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The industrial revolution in general, and the development of steam technology in particular, changed the way humans think about work. It was redefined not only politically and economically, but also scientifically. In 19th Century physics, it was mathematically formalised, and quantified in joules by the French scientist Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, for whom the Coriolis force was named -- a force that determines the gyrations of cyclones and tornadoes, but is also applicable, some suggest, to the circulation of information (as one commentator writes(1) : 'Imagine a cyclonic idea-whorl, a conceptual tempest, flashing with wit, thunderous with the cries of the mob -- an ideative storm that, as with the case of the industrial revolution, can be devastatingly violent, tearing society apart as thoroughly as if it were a low-rent Kansas trailer park.)
As the steam engine redefined work, so the computer has changed the way we understand information. In the Second World War, the warm innards of Alan Turing's early cryptanalytic machines gave birth to a new branch of science, information theory, which treats information as a fundamental factor of its equations. Inevitably, this evolved into the idea that information is itself physical, that is, as much part of the phenomenal universe as matter and energy.
>> (ADAM BROWNE cont'd)
1 Tunnock, L. G. The Current Climate: An Infometeorological Exegesis (Oxford University Press 2010)
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