Santa Fe Institute Community Lecture: James Gleick

Event Description

The Information: How We Came To Be Deluged By Tweets

James Gleick is author of Chaos; Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman; Isaac Newton; Faster, and What Just Happened. His latest book is The Information.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

The Santa Fe Institute’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 series focuses on human individual and social behavior. By transcending disciplines, breaking academic molds, and drawing together an international network of unorthodox creative thinkers, SFI is asking big questions that matter to science and society.