Decoding the universe, p.1
Decoding the Universe, page 1
Praise for Decoding the Universe
“The universe just might be an enormous computer—that’s the final, mind-twisting pirouette at the conclusion of Charles Seife’s new book about information theory and quantum computing, Decoding the Universe. By the time you get to this suggestion, the statement seems pretty plausible, but by then you’ve already traveled through Seife’s crystal-clear explications of thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes and multiple universes…. For the former liberal arts major and other right-brainers, Seife is the man; his lucid metaphors and unfussy descriptions (along with Matt Zimet’s fine illustrations) offer exceptionally solid footholds in some of the most bizarre and counterintuitive realms of physics. This is a great way to have your mind well and truly blown…. Decoding the Universe contains…abundant information about the fundamental nature of existence.”
—Salon.com
“This is a timely book, and Seife does an excellent job with an undeniably difficult topic. Decoding the Universe is an admirable effort to bring to life a subject that is often written about in dreadfully dry terms. Seife makes a clear case that information runs deep, akin to logic and pure mathematics, and the laws that constrain the possibilities of our world.”
—New Scientist
“The text is filled with interesting and quirky personalities…. The technical and psychological weight of the material is lightened throughout by the author’s unfailing sense of humor…. It will be a rare reader…who fails to be entertained and informed by this well-written granddaddy of all ghost stories.”
—Nature
Praise for Alpha & Omega
“Easy to read and understand…provides several nuggets that may enlighten even readers well versed in the popular literature. Seife’s discussion of the physics of background radiation is as clear and up-to-date as any found in popular literature. By the end, readers…should feel that their time, and money, have been well spent.”
—Lawrence Krauss, The New York Times Book Review
“A wonderfully clear and concise introduction to terms often too loosely bandied about. Seife’s armchair approach…eschews formal mathematics and welcomes readers unversed in advanced physics. Read this and you can pepper your conversation with terms like ‘flavored neutrino,’ ‘Hubble constant,’ ‘exotic dark matter’…with much greater confidence than before. Guaranteed.”
—Los Angeles Times
“[Seife’s] ability to draw parallels between current theory and timeless folklore is a mark of his range. He deftly avoids jargon in favor of lucid explanation, making Alpha & Omega an eminently approachable beginner’s guide to the origin and evolution of the universe.”
—Discover
Praise for Zero
“A stunning chronicle of the denial, heresy, and grudging acceptance of zero and its companion concepts, infinity, and the void.”
—U.S. News & World Report
“Zero may be nothing, but a lot comes out of Charles Seife’s story…which is charming and enlightening…. After finishing, his readers will feel they’ve experienced a considerable something.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Lively and lucid, [Zero] is a story that richly deserves telling…. Fascinating and memorable…some of the best, most comprehensible and engaging descriptions of math that anybody is likely to read anywhere…. The equivalent of an intellectual detective story that can be read comfortably by folks who had their last math course in high school, and cheated even then. From the first page to the last, Seife maintains a level of clarity and infectious enthusiasm that is rare in science writing, and practically unknown among those who dare to explain mathematics. Zero is really something.”
—The Washington Post
“Mathematicians, contrary to popular misconception, are often the most lucid of writers (Bertrand Russell won a Nobel Prize not in mathematics but in literature), and Seife is a welcome example. He writes with an understated charm that takes account of human fear, the mistakes of geniuses and the mind’s grandest ambitions.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Even innumerates…can appreciate the intricate web of conceptual connections Seife illuminates.”
—The Boston Globe
“The greater part of this book tells a fascinating human story with skill and wit…. We come to appreciate the surprising depth and richness of ‘simple’ concepts such as zero and infinity—and their remarkable links to the religion and culture of earlier civilizations and to present-day science.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Seife has a talent for making the most ballbusting of modern theories…seem fairly lucid and common sensical.”
—Salon.com
PENGUIN BOOKS
DECODING THE UNIVERSE
Charles Seife is the author of Alpha & Omega and Zero, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for first nonfiction book and was named a New York Times Notable Book. Seife received an MS in mathematics from Yale, and is an associate professor of journalism at New York University. He has written for Science magazine, New Scientist, Scientific American, The Economist, Wired, The Sciences, and many other publications. He lives in New York City.
Visit www.charlesseife.com
Charles Seife
DECODING THE UNIVERSE
HOW THE NEW SCIENCE OF INFORMATION IS EXPLAINING EVERYTHING IN THE COSMOS, FROM OUR BRAINS TO BLACK HOLES
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2007
Copyright © Charles Seife, 2006
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0127-5
CIP data available
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1REDUNDANCY
CHAPTER 2 DEMONS
CHAPTER 3 INFORMATION
CHAPTER 4 LIFE
CHAPTER 5 FASTER THAN LIGHT
CHAPTER 6 PARADOX
CHAPTER 7 QUANTUM INFORMATION
CHAPTER 8 CONFLICT
CHAPTER 9 COSMOS
APPENDIXA THE LOGARITHM
APPENDIXB ENTROPY AND INFORMATION
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Civilization is doomed.
That’s probably not the first thing you want to read when you pick up a book, but it’s true. Humanity—and all life in the universe—is going to be wiped out. No matter how advanced our civilization becomes, no matter if we develop the technology to hop from star to star or live for six hundred years, there is only a finite time left before the last living creature in the visible universe will be snuffed out. The laws of information have sealed our fate, just as they have sealed the fate of the universe itself.
The word information conjures visions of computers and hard drives and Internet superhighways; after all, the introduction and popularization of computers came to be known as the information revolution. However, computer science is only a very small aspect of an overarching idea known as information theory. While this theory does, in fact, dictate how computers work, it does much, much more than that. It governs the behavior of objects on many different scales. It tells how atoms interact with each other and how black holes swallow stars. Its rules describe how the universe will die, and they illuminate the structure of the entire cosmos. Even if there were no such thing as a computer, information theory would still be the third great revolution of twentieth-century physics.
The laws of thermodynamics—the rules that govern the motion of atoms in a chunk of matter—are, underneath it all, laws about information. The theory of relativity, which describes how objects beha ve at extreme speeds and under the strong influence of gravity, is actually a theory of information. Quantum theory, which governs the realm of the very small, is a theory of information as well. The concept of information, which is far broader than the mere content of a hard drive, ties together all these theories into one incredibly potent idea.
Information theory is so powerful because information is physical. Information is not just an abstract concept, and it is not just facts or figures, dates or names. It is a concrete property of matter and energy that is quantifiable and measurable. It is every bit as real as the weight of a chunk of lead or the energy stored in an atomic warhead, and just like mass and energy, information is subject to a set of physical laws that dictate how it can behave—how information can be manipulated, transferred, duplicated, erased, or destroyed. And everything in the universe must obey the laws of information, because everything in the universe is shaped by the information it contains.
The idea of information was born from the ancient art of codemaking and codebreaking. The ciphers that hid state secrets were, in fact, methods of obscuring information and transporting it from place to place. When the art of code cracking was combined with the science of thermodynamics—the branch of physics that describes the behavior of engines, the exchange of heat, and the production of work—information theory was the result. This new theory of information was an idea as revolutionary as quantum theory and relativity; it instantly transformed the field of communications and paved the way to the computer age, but that was just the beginning. Within a decade, physicists and biologists began to understand that the ideas of information theory govern much more than the bits and bytes of computers and codes and communications: they describe the behavior of the subatomic world, all life on Earth, and even the universe as a whole.
Each creature on Earth is a creature of information; information sits at the center of our cells, and information rattles around in our brains. But it’s not just living beings that manipulate and process information. Every particle in the universe, every electron, every atom, every particle not yet discovered, is packed with information—information that is often inaccessible to us, but information nonetheless, information that can be transferred, processed, and dissipated. Each star in the universe, each one of the countless galaxies in the heavens, is packed full of information, information that can escape and travel. That information is always flowing, moving from place to place, spreading throughout the cosmos.
Information appears, quite literally, to shape our universe. The motion of information may well determine the physical structure of the cosmos. And information seems to be at the heart of the deepest paradoxes in science—the mysteries of relativity and quantum mechanics, the origin and fate of life in the universe, the nature of the ultimate destructive power of the black hole, and the hidden order in a seemingly random cosmos.
The laws of information are beginning to reveal the answers to some of the most profound questions of science, but the answers are, in some ways, more disturbing and more bizarre than the paradoxes they solve. Information leads to a picture of a universe speeding toward its own demise, of living creatures as slaves to parasites within, and of an incredibly byzantine cosmos made up of an enormous collection of parallel universes.
The laws of information are giving physicists a way to understand the darkest mysteries that humanity has ever pondered. Yet those laws are painting a picture that is as grim as it is surreal.
CHAPTER 1
REDUNDANCY
Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail!
—Henry L. Stimson
“AF is short of water.” These five words sank the Japanese fleet.
In the spring of 1942, the U.S. military was reeling from an unbroken series of defeats. The Japanese navy was supreme in the Pacific, and it was pushing ever closer to American territories. Though the situation was dire, the war was not lost. And U.S. cryptanalysts were about to use a weapon as important as bombs and guns: information.
U.S. codebreakers had cracked JN-25, a cipher used by the Japanese navy. It was a tough code to break, but by May cryptanalysts had completely pried open the mathematical vault of the cipher and revealed the information hidden within.
According to the intercepted and decrypted messages, an American base, code-named AF, was shortly to be the object of a major naval assault. American analysts knew that AF was an island in the Pacific (quite possibly Midway Island), but they didn’t know for certain which one it was. If the analysts guessed wrong, the navy would defend the incorrect island, and the enemy would be able to invade the true target unopposed. But if they could figure out which island AF really was and anticipate the destination of Japan’s armada, the Americans could concentrate their fleet and maul the invading force. Everything—the war in the Pacific—hinged on one missing piece of information: Where was AF?
Commander Joseph Rochefort, head of the navy’s cryptography center at Pearl Harbor, came up with a scheme to get that one last piece of information. He ordered the base at Midway to transmit a phony request for help. The transmission stated that the water distillery on Midway Island had been damaged and the base was nearly out of freshwater. The Japanese, who were eavesdropping on Midway’s transmissions, heard the broadcast, too. This is precisely what Rochefort was counting on. Not long after the phony message, Navy Intelligence picked up the faint signals of a Japanese transmission on the airwaves: “AF is short of water.” Rochefort had his last bit of information. AF was Midway.
The U.S. fleet gathered to defend the island. On June 4, 1942, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s invading force ran directly into Admiral Chester Nimitz’s waiting fleet. During the battle, four Japanese aircraft carriers—the Hiryu, Soryu, Akagi, and Kaga—went to the bottom; in return, only one U.S. carrier was lost. The crippled Japanese fleet steamed home. Japan had lost the battle—and the war in the Pacific. The Japanese navy never again seriously threatened American territory, and the United States began the long, difficult drive to the Japanese homeland. A priceless piece of information, the target of Yamamoto’s invasion, leaked through the protection of codes and ciphers and gave America its crucial victory.1
World War II was the first information war. As U.S. cryptographers extracted information from the Japanese JN-25 and Purple ciphers, an elite group of British and Polish codebreakers unraveled Germany’s (supposedly) uncrackable Enigma cipher. And just as information allowed the United States to defeat Japan, the Enigma information gave the Allies a way to defeat the Nazi U-boats that were choking Great Britain.
Just as the struggle over information left its imprint on the face of the war, the war left its imprint on the face of information. During World War II, cryptography began to change from an art to a science. The codebreakers in the sweaty code rooms in Hawaii and on a quaint estate in England would be the heralds of a revolution known as information theory.
Codemaking and codebreaking were always closely related to what would become the theory of information. However, for millennia, cryptographers and cryptanalysts had no idea that they were making tentative forays into an entirely new field of science. After all, encryption is older than science. Over and over again, since antiquity, monarchs and generals have relied upon the information hidden by the fragile security of a cipher or a hidden message—awkward attempts to circumvent the dangers of information transfer.
Codemaking goes back to the dawn of Western civilization. In 480 BC, ancient Greece was nearly conquered by the much stronger Persian Empire, but a secret message, hidden under the wax of a writing tablet, warned of an impending invasion. Alarmed at the message, the Greeks immediately began preparing for war. The forewarned Greeks roundly defeated the Persians at the battle of Salamis, ending the Persian threat and ushering in the golden age of Greece. But for that hidden message, the fragile collection of Greek city-states would not have been able to resist the much more powerful Persian navy; Greece would likely have become a Persian conquest, and Western civilization would have turned out quite differently.
