All language subtitles for The Evolution of Technology A Journey with Jim Al-Khalili.en

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we are surrounded by

order over the last 300 years we've

developed amazing new ways to harness

energy and we've used this ability to

transform our environment

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but all these structures that we see

around us are just one type of visible

order that we've created here on planet

Earth there's another type of invisible

order every bit as complex that we're

only now beginning to understand it's

something that nature has been

harnessing for billions of years

something we call information

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the concept of information is a very

strange one it's actually a very

difficult idea to get your head round

but in the journey to try and understand

it scientists would discover that

information is actually a fundamental

part of our

universe this film is the story of

information and the immense Power

released from manipul ating

it it's the story of how we discovered

the power of

symbols and how writing codes and

computers would revolutionize our

understanding of the

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universe is the story of how in a cosmos

collapsing into disorder information can

be used to create order and structure

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at first glance information appears to

be a very straightforward

idea it exists everywhere in our world

World our brains are filled with it and

we constantly exchange it between each

other but information has been one of

the subtlest and most difficult Concepts

that science has had to Grapple

with understanding and harnessing it has

been an extremely long and difficult

process the power of information would

first be glimpsed over 5,000 years ago

when a revolutionary technology was

developed one that would set the modern

world in

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motion over the years mankind has come

up with some pretty remarkable

stuff but of all Humanity's inventions

there's one that really stands out it's

the most transformative disruptive cre

ative technology ever conceived and it's

also one of the

simplest that invention is the written

word at its heart writing is all about

the transmission and storage of

information

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words allow ideas to endure through

time these are some of the earliest

texts in existence and they give us an

incredible insight into the development

of

writing I've come to meet one of the few

people who can still read them Dr Irving

finle we take writing so much for

granted these days that I guess it's

easy to forget

that it was invented it certainly was

how did it first come about the earliest

writing that we have is written on play

tablets and it comes from Iraq ancient

Mesopotamia and it comes from the

culture of the Sumerians and what

happened here was that they started off

with purely pictographic signs to

express an idea and this lasted for

quite a long time until it occurred to

somebody perhaps accidentally that what

you could do is to make one of these

graphic symbols on the surface of the

clay not for what it looked like but for

what the sound it represented was so a

picture of an object a picture of a

sound that's what we always call the

giant leap for

mankind by combining different sounding

pictures the ancient Mesopotamians could

express any idea

imaginable the essence of their

breakthrough was to to see for example

that a picture of an i and a picture of

a deer didn't have to mean an i and a

deer the pictures could be used simply

for the sounds they made in this case

idea once this system was discovered it

meant anything that could be spoken even

the most strange or abstract thoughts

could be transformed into symbols

information could now live outside of

the human

brain and this meant it could endure

over vast spans of

time it was an idea that fascinated the

ancient

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Mesopotamians this lovely tablet here

this King Oram who lived in about uh

2,100 BC okay he buried this in the

foundations of this Temple as a message

for the future this king or namu the

powerful male king of er king of Suma

and aad so that's the South and the

north part of ancient Mesopotamia her

house he built for her and he even

restored it afterwards so this is a

proud thing and he wants everybody to

know about it and this is a real message

for the future what's so remarkable for

me is that this is information stored on

clay for thousands of years yes ideas

that someone had for 4,000 years ago are

still there you have ideas you have

speech you have human hopes you have

literature you have prayers you have all

these sorts of outpourings of the human

soul fixed forever in

clay by turning sounds into symbols the

Mesopotamian scribes had discovered that

information could be changed very easily

from one form to

another from something that existed as

spoken sounds to something that existed

as symbols on clay

tablets but this was just the beginning

humans were yet to realize the true

power of symbols

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for 4,000 years writing was pretty much

the only information technology people

used but in the 19th century during the

great industrial revolution things would

begin to

change in the malstrom of ideas and

inventions a series of seemingly

unconnected Technologies would emerge em

merge that all began to hint at the

immense power of

information these Technologies would all

come from very practical very unth

theoretical Origins but they would start

to reveal that information was a much

deeper and more powerful concept than

anyone had

realized one of the first of a new breed

of information Technologies would be

developed in the French city of leyon at

the end of the 18th

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century 18th century Leon was home to

some of the best Craftsmen in the world

it was also a place of great opulence

Grandeur and above all money thanks to

the rich and fashionable Aristocrats and

bankers who live there it will become

home to the greater silk weaving

industry in the world almost a third of

the city's inhabitants worked in the

silk industry and it was home to over

14,000

looms this is broade the material that

made Leon famous it's a beautiful and

intricately woven fabric that as you

might imagine is incredibly labor

intensive to produce a Twan team working

flat out for a day could at best produce

about an inch of this amazing

stuff the demand for the Fine Fabrics of

Leon was immense but the silk weaving

process was painfully

slow but thanks to a soldier and Weaver

named Joseph Marie jacard a device will

be developed to help speed up weaving in

the process it would would reveal a

fundamental truth about

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information building on the work of a

number of others in 1804 jacard patented

his invention at the time the loom was

the most complex mechanism ever built by

humankind

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Jack hard's Loom was a miracle of

Ingenuity you see he designed a single

machine which without any alteration to

its construction its Hardware to use a

modern term could be programmed to weave

any pattern a designer could think up in

fact it could produce a whole range of

silk designs with barely a pause in

production

jackard had found the Holy Grail of

weaving and his secret was a simple

punched

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card the punched card held within it the

essence of the designs that the loom

would

weave when these punched cards were fed

into the loom they would act to lower

and lift the relevant

threads recreating the pattern in

silk any design you could think of could

be broken down and translated into a

series of Punch Cards and could then be

woven by the loom

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information was being translated from

picture to punch card to the finished

fabric it is a machine for weaving

textiles that's its tasks but there is

nothing specific about what textile it

should weave that is contained in the

information which is encoded on the

cards so if you like the cards program

it that is to say instruct it what to do

and this has huge resonances for what

came

later Jack hard's Loom revolutionized

the silk industry but at its heart was

something deeper something more

Universal than its industrial Origins

and its ability to speed up weaving the

loom revealed the power of abstracting

information it showed that you can take

the essence of something extract the

Vital Information and represent it in

another form

writing had revealed you could use a set

of symbols to capture spoken language

now jacard had shown that with just two

symbols a hole or a blank space it was

possible to capture the information in

any picture

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imaginable this is a portrait of jackard

that's been woven in silk it's

spectacularly detailed with hundreds of

thousands of stitches and yet all the

information you need to capture this

lifelike image can be stored in a series

of punched cards 24,000 of them to be

precise

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this picture is a fantastic example of a

really far-reaching

idea that the simplest of systems in

this case cards with a series of holes

punched in them can capture the essence

of something much much more

complicated if 24,000 Punch Cards could

create an image like

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this what would happen if you had 24

million or 24 trillion

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cards what new types of complex

information might be able to be captured

and represented

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jacard had stumbled on an incredibly

deep and far reaching

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idea as long as you have enough of them

simple symbols can be used to describe

anything in the entire universe

translating information into abstract

symbols to store and process had proven

to be an extremely powerful

idea but the way information was sent

the way it was communicated hadn't

changed for thousands of

years the world before

telecommunications technology was a very

different place because you can only

send messages as fast as you could send

objects so you'd write a message on a

piece of paper or something like that

and then you'd either give it to

somebody who could run very fast or

could go on a horse or on a ship very

fast but the point was you could only

send information as fast as you could

send

matter but in the 19th century the speed

at which information could be sent would

dramatically increase thanks to an

incredible new information carrying

medium

electricity very soon after electricity

was discovered excitement grew about its

potential as a medium to transmit

messages it seemed that if it could be

controlled and summoned at will

electricity would be the perfect medium

for sending

information electricity seemed to offer

many advantages as a way of sending

messages

it was sent down a wire which means it

could pretty much go anywhere it wasn't

affected by bad weather conditions and

most importantly it could move very

quickly but there was one big problem

facing those in the early 19th century

who wanted to use electricity as a means

to communicate how could such a simple

signal be used to send complex

messages here in the science museum

archive they have one of the most

impressive collections of early

electronic communications technology in

the

world here are just some of the early

devices designed to send signals using

electricity this one's particularly fun

it was developed in 1809 in Bavaria by

Samuel suing so if the sender wants to

send letter A sends a current through

that corresponding wire at the

receiver's end is a tank full of liquid

and the electric current forces a

chemical reaction causing bubbles to

appear above the corresponding letter A

the whole process is ingenious if a

little

laborious but what's really fun is that

the sender has to let the receiver know

he's about to send a signal he does that

by sending extra electric current so

that more bubbles appear forcing an arm

upwards which releases a

ball and triggers a bell

as you can imagine this wouldn't be the

quickest of systems after summering all

sorts of approaches were taken in trying

to crack the problem of sending messages

using

electricity but they all suffered from

having overco complex

codes these devices each cunning and

Innovative in its own way were all

destined for the scrap peep of history

and that's because in the 1840s they

were superseded by a way of sending

signals that still endures to this day

it was developed by artist and

entrepreneur Samuel Mor together with

his colleague Alfred Vil what was so

special about their system wasn't the

technology that was used to carry their

messages but the incredibly simple and

effective code they used to send them

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just like jaar's Punch Cards The Genius

of mors and veil's code lay in its

Simplicity using a collection of short

and long pulses of electrical current

they could spell out the letters of the

alphabet Veil suggested the most

frequent letters in the English language

get the shortest

code so an e is sent like

this while an X is sent like

this this means that messages can be

sent quickly and

efficiently figuring out the code part

of it the software if you like was as

complicated is figuring out the hardware

side of things with the batteries and

the and the wires and together they made

an entirely new technology which is the

electric

Telegraph the telegraph had once again

revealed the power of translating

information from one medium to

another information had at first been

fixed in human

brains then held in symbols in clay and

paper and punched

cards now thanks to Morse information

could reside in electricity

and this made it unimaginably lighter

and quicker than it had ever been

before in just a few short years the

telegraph Network would spread around

the entire Globe laying the foundations

of the modern Information

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Age between them Jack card and Morse had

found new and novel ways to manipulate

process and transmit information what

had begun with the invention of writing

thousands of years ago had culminated in

The Binding of the entire planet in a

lce of wires carrying highly abstracted

information at incredible speeds for

people at the end of the 19th century it

may have seemed that Humanity's ability

to manipulate and transmit information

was that it's Zenith they couldn't have

been more wrong information would reveal

itself to be a more important more

fundamental concept than anyone could

have

imagined it would soon become apparent

that information wasn't just about human

communication it was a much further

reaching idea than

that the true nature of information

would first be hinted at thanks to a Str

problem one dreamed up by a brilliant

Scottish physicist who appeared to be

thinking about something else

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entirely James Clark Maxwell was one of

the great minds of the 19th century

among his many interests Maxwell became

fascinated by the science of

thermodynamics the study of heat and

motion that had sprung up with the birth

of the steam

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engine Maxwell was one of the first to

understand that heat is really just the

motion of molecules the hotter something

is the faster its molecule are

moving this idea would lead Maxwell to

dream up a very bizarre thought

experiment in which information played a

crucial

role Maxwell theorized that simply by

knowing what's going on inside a box

full of air it would be possible to make

one half hotter and the other half

colder

think of it like building an oven next

to a fridge without using any

energy it sounds crazy but Maxwell's

argument was extremely persuasive it

goes like this imagine a small demon

perched on top of the box who has such

excellent eyesight that he can observe

accurately the motion of all the

molecules of air inside the

box now crucially he's in control of a

partition that divides the box into two

halves every every time he sees a fast

moving molecule approaching the

partition from the right hand side he

opens it up allowing it through to the

left and every time he sees a slow

moving molecule approaching the

partition from the left he opens it up

allowing the molecule through to the

right

now you can see what's going to happen

over time all the fast moving hot

molecules will accumulate on the left

hand side of the box and all the slow

moving cold molecules on the right

crucially the demon has done this

salting with nothing more than

information about the motion of the

molecules Maxwell's demon seem to say

that just by having information about

the molecules you could create order

from

disorder this idea flew in the face of

19th century

thinking the science of thermodynamics

had shown very clearly that over time

the entropy of the universe its disorder

would always increase things were

destined to fall apart

but the demon seemed to suggest that you

could put things back together without

using any energy at

all just by using information you could

create

order it would prove to be a

fishlyn least because the brilliant

Maxwell had come up with an idea far far

ahead of its time

it's amazing the the impact he had had

on on physics and that he came up with

this very intricate concept and that he

already in some sense pre well

anticipated the the notion of

information that wasn't actually there

at that time there was no such

thing I think this idea was was

astonishing he didn't really have a

resolution he raised it as a as a con

conern and he left it open and I think

what followed is more or less 120 years

of of extremely exciting debates and

developments to try to resolve and

address this uh

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concern so what was going on with

Maxwell's demon it may sound far-fetched

and fanciful but imagine the

possibilities if we could build a

machine in the real world that could

mimic the actions of the demon I could

use it to heat a cup of coffee or to run

an engine or to power a city all using

nothing more than pure

information it's as though we could

create order in the universe without

expending any

energy scientists felt intuitively that

it had to be wrong the problem was it

would take over a hundred years to solve

the

problem while Maxwell's riddle rumbled

on something quite unexpected was to

happen a new device was dreamt up that

could perform quite incredible and

complex tasks simply by processing

information what's more this was a

device that could actually be built the

machine would come to be known as the

computer and the idea behind it came

from a quite remarkable and Visionary

scientist Alan Turing was the first

person to conceive of the modern

computer a machine whose sole function

is to manipulate and process information

a machine that harnesses the power of

abstract symbols a machine that enables

almost every aspect of the modern

world turing's incredible idea would

first appear in a now legendary

mathematical paper published in

1936 in his brief life Alan churing

brought fresh groundbreaking ideas to a

whole range of topics from cryptography

through to biology the sheer breth of

his thinking is

breathtaking but for most scientists

it's the concepts he outlined in these

36 pages that Mark him out as truly

special it's this work that makes him

worthy of the title

genius published when churing was just

24 years old on computable numbers with

an application to the Enid's problem

tackles the foundations of mathematical

logic what's amazing about it is that

the idea for the modern computer emerged

simply as a consequence of Ching's

brilliant

reasoning he was thinking about

something else entirely he wasn't you

know sort of sitting there thinking I

want to try and invent the modern

computer he was thinking about this very

abstract problem in the foundations of

mathematics and the computer kind of

fell sideways out of that research

completely unexpectedly I mean nobody

could have guessed that turing's um you

know very abstract abstruse research in

the foundations of mathematics could

produce anything of any practical value

whatsoever let alone a machine that was

going to change the lives of you know

nearly everyone on the

planet touring had set out to understand

if certain processes in mathematics

could be done simply by following a set

of rules and this is what would get him

thinking about

computers in 1936 the word computer had

a very different meaning to what it does

today it meant a real person with a

pencil and paper engaged in arithmetical

calculations Banks hired many such

people often women to work out interest

payments

the Inland Revenue employed them to work

out how much tax to charge observatories

hired them to calculate navigational

data human computers were vital to the

modern world dealing with the huge

amounts of information produced as

science and industry grew ever more

complex what Turing did in his 1936

paper was ask a simple but profound

question

what goes on in the mind of a person

carrying out a

computation to do this he first had to

discard all the Superfluous details so

that only the very essence of the

process of computation remained so first

off went the ink pot then the pen then

the slide rule then the pencils and the

pads of paper all these things made it

easier but none of them were absolutely

crucial to the person car in out the

computation now churing asked what goes

on in the brain of a human computer it's

a vastly complex biological system

capable of Consciousness thoughts and

insights but to touring none of these

was critical to the process of

computation either touring realized that

to compute something a set of rules had

to be followed precisely that was all

he takes the higher level intelligence

that was presupposed to be involved in

calculation which is thinking and says

you can have a mechanical process that

is and by mechanically means an

unthinking process to perform the same

act and therefore eliminates the the

necessity of human agency with all its

high level level functions and that is

what is revolutionary about what he

tries to

do during's brilliant mind saw that any

calculation had two aspects the data and

the instructions for what to do with the

data and this will be the key to his

Insight juring had to find a way of

getting machines to understand

instructions like add subtract multiply

divide and so on in the same way that

humans do in other words he had to find

a way of translating instructions like

the

into a language that machines could

understand and with flawless impeccable

logic touring did exactly

that this may look like a random series

of ones and zeros but to a Computing

machine it's a set of instructions that

can be read off step by step telling the

machine to behave in a certain

way so while a human computer could look

at this symbol and understand the

process that was required the Computing

machine had to have it explained like

this this paper tape that churing

envisaged is what we would Now call the

memory of the

computer but churing didn't stop

there juring realized that feeding a

machine instructions in this way had an

amazing

consequence it meant that just one

machine is needed to perform almost any

task you can think of it's a beautifully

simple Concept in order to get the

machine to do something new all you had

to do was feed it a new set of

instructions new

information this idea became known as

the universal touring

machine the more you wanted your machine

to do the longer the tape had to

be bigger memories could hold complex

multi-layered instructions about how to

process and order any kind of

information

imaginable with a big enough memory the

computer will be capable of an almost

Limitless number of

tasks this idea of Chings that a

multitude of different tasks can be

carried out Simply by giving a Computing

machine a long sequence of instructions

is his greatest Legacy since his paper

touring's dream has been realized so

calculations making phone calls

recording moving images writing letters

listening to music none of these require

bespoke machines they can all be carried

out on a single

device a Computing machine

this phone is a modern incarnation of

touring's amazing idea inside here are

many many instructions what we' call

programs or software or apps that are

nothing more than a long sequence of

numbers telling the phone what to

do what's amazing about touring's idea

is its incredible scope the sets of

instructions that can be fed to a

computer could tell it how to mimic

telephones or

typewriters but they could also describe

the rules of nature the laws of

physics the processes of the natural

world this is a simulation of many

millions of particles behaving like a

fluid to work out how it flows the

computer simply follows a set of

instructions held in its

memory this only begins to hint at the

power of computing

machines this is a computer simulation

of the large scale structure of the

entire universe and it reveals the true

power of Ching's

idea turning instructions into symbols

that a machine can understand allows to

recreate not just a simple picture or

sound but a process a system something

that is changing and

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evolving by manipulating simple symbols

computers are capable of capturing the

essence the order of the natural world

itself

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by thinking about how the human brain

processes and computes information Alan

churing had had one of the most

important ideas of the 20th

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century the power of information was

revealing itself

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it would be very easy to think that

after Ching's ideas Were Made Real the

true power of information would be

Unleashed but churing was only half the

story The Modern Information Age would

require another idea one that would

finally pin down the nature of

information and its relationship to the

order and disorder of the universe

it was an idea that would be dreamt up

by a gifted and eccentric mathematician

and

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engineer Claude Shannon was a true

Maverick and his desire to tackle

unusual problems would lead to a

revolutionary new

idea one that would uncover the

fundamental nature of information and

the process of communication in all its

varied

forms this is Claude Shannon's paper a

mathematical theory of communication now

the title may sound a bit dry but trust

me it's one of the most important

scientific papers of the 20th century

not only did it lay the foundations for

the modern world's communication Network

it also gave us fresh insights into

human language into things we do

intuitively like speaking and

writing the paper was published in

1948 while Shannon was working at the

Bell labs in New Jersey the research arm

of the vast Bell Telephone Network it

was an institution famous for its

Forward Thinking relaxed

atmosphere the mathematicians were free

to work on any problem that interested

them the only thing that the laboratory

management required of them is that they

keep an open door and if anybody from

any other department came with a problem

that they would at least think about it

otherwise they were absolutely free and

the atmosphere the were atmosphere was

incredible people were playing and

encouraged to

play hello I'm Claud Shannon a

mathematician here at the Bell Telephone

Laboratories Claude Shannon in

particular killer was given free reign

to do pretty much whatever he wanted

this is Theus Theus is an electrically

controlled

Mouse oh they treated him as their

darling I never saw him juggle but I

certainly saw him right as unicycle he

brought it to work one day and he must

have costed BBs at at least a 100 men

hours of time

but despite the frivolity the Bell

Telephone Network faced a huge problem

every day they transmitted vast amounts

of electronic information all across the

world but they had no real idea of how

to measure this information properly or

how to quantify

it in short their entire business was

built on something they didn't actually

understand amazing ly their Superstar

employee Claude Shannon would give them

exactly what they

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needed in this paper Shannon did

something absolutely incredible he took

the vague and mysterious concept of

information and managed to pin it down

now he didn't do this using some

cleverly worded philosophical definition

he actually found a way to measure the

information contained in a

message amazingly Shannon realized that

the quantity of information in a message

had nothing to do with its meaning

instead he showed it was related solely

to how unusual the message

was information is related to

unexpectedness so news is news because

it's it's unexpected and the more

unexpected it is the more newsworthy it

is so if today's news was the same as

yesterday's news there would be no news

at all and the their information content

would be zero so suddenly you have a

relationship

between

unexpectedness

and

information but Shannon was to go

further and give information its very

own unit of measurement

so how did he do this well he showed

that any message you care to send could

be translated into binary digits a long

sequence of ones and zeros so a simple

greeting like hello could be written

like

this or like

this just think of this as another way

of writing the same

message Shannon realized that

transforming information into binary

digits would be an immensely powerful

act it would make information manageable

exact controllable and

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precise in his paper Shannon showed that

a single binary digit one of these ones

or zeros is a a fundamental unit of

information think of it as an atom of

information the smallest possible piece

then having defined this basic unit he

even gave us a name for it one we're all

familiar with today he used a shortening

of the phrase binary digit

bit The Humble bit turned out to be an

enormously powerful

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idea the bit as the smallest quantity of

information it is highly significant

because it's the fundamental atom it is

the smallest unit of information in

which there's sufficient discrimination

to communicate anything at

all the power of the bit lay in its

universality any system that has two

states like a coin with heads or tails

can carry one bit of

information one or zero punched or not

punched on or off stop or go all of

these systems can store one bit of

information thanks to Shannon the bit

became the common language of all

information anything sounds pictures

text can be turned into bits and

transmitted by any system capable of

being in just two

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states Shannon had founded a new

far-reaching Theory the ideas he began

to explore would form the Cornerstone of

what we now call information theory he

taken an abstract concept information

and turn it into something tangible

what had been just a vague notion was

now measurable Something

Real the idea of converting into bits

into making things digital would

fundamentally transform many aspects of

human

society but information isn't just

something humans create we're beginning

to understand that this concept lies at

the heart not only of 21st century Human

Society but also at the heart of the

physical world itself every bit of

information we've ever created every

book every film the entire contents of

the internet amounts to pretty much

nothing when compared with the

information content of Nature and that's

because even the most insignificant

event contains a spectacular amount of

information let me show

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you imagine how many bits of information

you would need to describe this

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the beautiful and intricate interplay of

physical laws taking place at scales and

time frames that are normally

imperceptible to

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us but here you're still only seeing a

fraction of the complexity of nature

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imagine the interplay between the

trillions upon trillions of

atoms the amount of bits you would need

to describe this is almost unimaginable

but what's amazing is that now thanks to

the ideas of churing and Shannon we're

able to describe model and simulate

nature in ever greater

detail but this isn't the end of the

story information it seems isn't just a

way of describing

reality in the last few years we've

discovered that information is actually

an inep able part of the physical

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world it's a really difficult idea to

get to grips with but information

everything from a beatoven symphony to

the contents of a dictionary even a

fleeting thought all information needs

to be embodied in some form of physical

system amazingly the reason we

understand the true connection between

information and reality is because of

Maxwell's

demon remember it seemed like the demon

could use information to create order in

a box of air that started out completely

disordered moreover it could do this

without expending ing any

effort information seemed to be able to

break the laws of

physics well that's not true it

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can't the reason why Maxwell's demon

can't get energy for free lies here in

his head

what was discovered was this the demon

really is using nothing more than

information to create useful energy but

this doesn't mean that he's getting

something for nothing remember how the

demon Works he spots a fast moving

molecule on one side of the Box opens a

partition and lets it through to the

other side but each time he does that he

has to store information about that

molecule's speed in his

memory soon his memory will fill up and

then he can only continue if he starts

deleting

information crucially this deletion

would require him to expend

energy the demon needs to keep a record

of which molecules are moving where and

if the recordkeeping device is only

finite size at some point the Demon's

going to have to erase it that's an

irreversible process that increases the

entropy of the universe it's the Eraser

of information

that increases entropy once and for

all what was discovered is that there's

a certain specific minimum amount of

energy known as the landour limit that's

required to delete one bit of

information it's tiny less than a

trillion trillionth of the amount of

energy in a gram of sugar but it's real

it's a part of the fundamental fabric of

the

Universe amazingly we can now do real

experiments that test aspects of

Maxwell's idea by using lasers and tiny

particles of dust scientists around the

world have explored the relationship

between information and energy with

Incredible

accuracy Maxwell's thought experiments

dreamt up in the age of steam Still

Remains at The Cutting Edge of

scientific research

today Maxwell's demon links together two

of the most important Concepts in

science the study of energy and the

study of information and shows that the

two are profoundly linked what we now

know is that information far from being

some abstract concept A obeys the same

laws of physics as everything else in

the

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universe information is not just an

abstraction uh just a mathematical thing

or formula that you write on the paper

it actually information is carried by

something so it's encoded onto something

a stone a book um a CD uh whatever

there's a carrier where the is on and

that means that information behaves

according to the laws of physics so it

cannot break the laws of

physics what Humanity has learned over

the last few Millennia is that

information can never be divorced from

the physical

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world but this is not a hind Hance what

makes information so powerful is the

fact it can be stored in any physical

system we

choose from using Stone and Clay to

allow information to be preserved over

eons to using electricity and light so

it can be sent quickly the medium that

stores information gives it unique

properties today scientists are

exploring new ways of manipulating

information using everything from DNA to

Quantum particles they hope that this

work will Usher in a new information age

every bit as transformative as the

last what we now know is that we're just

at the beginning of our journey to

unlock the power of information

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it's always been clear that creating

physical order the structures we see

around us has a cost we need to do work

to expend energy to build them but in

the last few years we've learned that

ordering information creating the

invisible digital structures of the

modern world also has an inescapable

cost as abstract and ethereal as

information seems we now know it must

always be embodied in a physical system

I find this an incredibly exciting idea

think about it this way a lump of clay

can be used to write a poem on molecules

of air can carry the sound of a symphony

and a single photon is like a

paintbrush every aspect of the physical

Universe can can be thought of as a

blank canvas which we can use to build

Beauty structure and Order

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oh