Chapter Three — Claude Shannon

On a rainy afternoon I opened the door of a room full of machines that looked like toys. A doll that juggled. A metal mouse running a maze. A ridiculous box: flip the switch and the lid opens, a small hand comes out, and turns the switch back off. Rain sounded at the window, and inside the room gears clicked away on their own. A man was lightly turning three balls in the air. "A complicated room," I said, smiling. "I have done one thing my whole life." He caught the balls in his hand. "Take any message in the world — words, pictures, music — strip away everything redundant, and measure exactly how much is left inside. And the smallest grain of that turned out to be simple. Yes or no. On or off. That one fork is the smallest unit of information. Every word and picture and song in the world breaks down, in the end, into thousands upon thousands of those little yes-or-nos. Do you know how much the world changed on that one thing? Every screen you look at, every piece of news you receive, stands on it." "So you built a scale that weighs information." "Exactly that." He nodded, pleased. "Before, no one could say how much information there was. I wrote it down as a number." "Then," I asked slowly, "does that number also tell you what the message means?" He started to answer and stopped. The balls in his hand came slowly to rest. "...No." He said it at last, a little startled at himself. "My scale weighs how much of a message there is. It says nothing at all about what it means. 'I love you' and a heap of letters with no sense in them weigh the same, if they are the same length. In my arithmetic the two are identical." He sat down slowly. "I measured everything that could be measured. And the thing people actually want to know... wasn't there." The rain filled the room. My eye went to the ridiculous box — the one whose hand comes out and shuts it off. "What is that one for?" I asked. He looked at it and grinned. "It's good for absolutely nothing. You turn it on, a hand comes out, and it turns itself off. That's all it does. And of everything I have made, I like it best." He took a moment to find the words. "Every machine in the world is built to do more of something. Faster, more of it. That fellow does one thing only. It stops. Maybe the hardest wisdom isn't knowing more — maybe it's knowing where to take your hand away." "It is a strange thing," he said, looking at his own hands. "The deeper you know, the clearer it becomes what you don't know. I dug down to the floor of information, and what I met on that floor was something that couldn't be measured. I thought knowing more would make me lighter. It made me heavier. The way the dark around a lamp looks wider the brighter you turn it up." He set one ball back on his palm. "I did this all my life. So as not to drop anything. The more I knew, the more balls I had in the air, and my hands went faster and faster for fear of losing one. But however many balls there are, they never teach you why they turn. My hands got faster and my mind understood less." "And when you reach that edge," I asked, "what do you do? At the place where nothing more can be measured." He was quiet a long while. The rain thinned. "...At first I thought it was a cliff," he said quietly. "The place my scale couldn't reach. For a man who spent his life measuring, that was failure. But lately it feels different. That unmeasurable place may not be a cliff. It may be a floor. Nothing below it to fall to — and so, at last, something to stand on. All my life I kept everything in the air so I wouldn't be shaken, and what actually held me up was the one thing I never managed to hold. Not knowing isn't frightening. Strangely. It feels like an anchor. Something that keeps you from being carried off in rough water." He set the ball down on the table, gently. For the first time in his life, with no fear of dropping it. I looked at the ball he had put down. It came to me that the floor he called an anchor might be someone's open palm holding him up. I too had spent a lifetime measuring and measuring, straining not to let anything slip. And watching Shannon set the ball down, something in me seemed to open its hand as well. Perhaps the hand that held him was touching my own dry palm too. Across the room the metal mouse ran its maze and reached the end. Then it stopped. Having arrived, it did not know where to go next, and so it simply stayed where it was. Cleverly, and at peace. I watched that small peace for a long time. As I stepped out into the rain, the cloud at the end of that dry sky seemed to have grown another hand's width.