The story of information began in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanished as soon as it was born.
From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, author James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that have changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of key figures contributing to information as our era’s defining quality, and takes us straight to the frontiers of information theory today.
Watch Gleick's community lecture (48 minutes)
James Gleick is author of Chaos, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, and Isaac Newton as well as Faster and What Just Happened. His latest book is The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.
This lecture was generously underwritten by Joy and Phil LeCuyer. Support for SFI's 2012 community lecture series is provided by Los Alamos National Bank.
SFI’s community lectures offer a window into the Institute’s research to understand the common patterns in physical, computational, biological, and social complex systems that underlie the most profound issues facing science and society today. This year’s lecture series focuses on human individual and social behavior.
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