The Power And Story Of Information | Order and Disorder | Spark

[Music] 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 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 [Music] 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 the information is actually a fundamental part of our universe this film is the story of information and the immense power released from manipulating it it's the story of how we discovered the power of symbols and how writing codes and computers will revolutionize our understanding of the universe is the story of how in a cosmos collapsing into disorder information can be used to create order and structure [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] at first glance information appears to be a very straightforward idea it exists everywhere in our 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 motion [Music] 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 creative 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 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 Finkel 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 clay 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 not a picture of an object a picture of a sound that's what we always called 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 see for example that a picture of an eye and a picture of a deer didn't have to mean an eye and a deer the pictures could be used simply for the sounds they made in this case idea [Music] once the 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 then this meant it could endure over vast spans of time it was an idea that fascinated the ancient Mesopotamians [Music] this lovely tablet here this king or now who lived in about 2100 BC okay he buried this in the foundations of this temple as a message for the future this king or now me was a powerful male king of a king of Sumer and Akkad so that's the South in the north part of ancient Mesopotamia her house he built for her and he even restored it afterwards so this is the 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 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 [Music] for four thousand 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 maelstrom of ideas and inventions a series of seemingly unconnected technologies would emerge that all began to hint at the immense power of information these technologies would all come from very practical very unfit achill 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 Lyon at the end of the 18th century 18th century Lyon 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 lived there it will become home to the greatest silk weaving industry in the world almost 1/3 of the city's inhabitants worked in the silk industry and it was home to over fourteen thousand looms this is brocade 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 two-man team working flat out for a day could it best produce about an inch of this amazing stuff the demand for the fine fabrics of Lyon was immense but the silk weaving process was painfully slow but thanks to a soldier and Weaver named Joseph Marie jacquard a device will be developed to help speed up weaving in the process it would reveal a fundamental truth about information [Music] building on the work of a number of others in 1804 jacquard patented his invention at the time the loom was the most complex mechanism ever built by humankind [Music] jacquard 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 jacquard had found the holy grail of weaving and his secret was a simple punched card [Music] 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 that could then be woven by the loom [Music] 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 jacquard 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 jacquard had shown that with just two symbols a hole or a blank space it was possible to capture the information in any picture imaginable this is a portrait of jacquard 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 [Music] 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 this what would happen if you had 24 million or 24 trillion cards [Music] what new types of complex information might be able to be captured and represented jacquard had stumbled on an incredibly deep and far-reaching idea [Music] 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 to 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 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 it 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 summering so if the sender wants to send a letter a he sends a current through that corresponding wire at the receivers 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 currents so that more bubbles appear forcing an arm upwards which releases a ball and fingers about 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 that they all suffered from having over complex codes these devices each cunning and innovative in its own way were all destined for the scrap heap 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 Morse together with his colleague Alfred Vail what was her 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 him [Music] just like jacquards punchcards the genius of Morse and vales 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 Vale suggested that 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 as 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 have first been fixed in human brains then held in symbols in clay and paper and punched cards now thanks to Moore's 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 age [Music] between them jacquard 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 lattice 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 at its 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 strange problem one dreamed up by a brilliant Scottish physicist who appeared to be thinking about something else entirely [Music] 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 engine [Music] Maxwell was one of the first to understand that heat is really just the motion of molecules the hotter something is the faster it's molecules are moving this idea would lead Maxwell to dream up a very bizarre thought experiment in which information played a crucial role [Music] Maxwell theorized that simply by knowing what's going on inside a box full of air it will 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 could observe accurately the motion of all the molecules of air inside the box now crucially is a control of a partition that divides the box into two halves every time he sees a fast-moving molecule approaching the partition from the right hand side he opens that 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 snow moving cold molecules on the right crucially the demon has done this sorting with nothing more than information about the motion of the molecules Maxwell's demon seemed 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 fiendishly difficult problem to solve not least because the brilliant Maxwell had come up with an idea far far ahead of its time it's amazing the impact he had on physics and that he came up with this guy intricate concept and that he already in some sense pre were 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 concern and he left it open and I think what followed is more or less hundred and twenty years of extremely exciting debates and developments to try to resolve and address this concern [Music] 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 it 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 the 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 Turing brought fresh groundbreaking ideas to a whole range of topics from cryptography through to biology the sheer breadth of his thinking is breathtaking but for most scientists it's the concept 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 churring was just 24 years old on computable numbers with an application to the insurance 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 Turing's brilliant reasoning it 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 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 Turing 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 arithmetic elations 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 cheering did in his 1936 paper was asked 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 when the inkpot 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 carrying out the computation now Turing 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 curing none of these was critical to the process of computation either Turing realized that to compute something a set of rules had to be followed precisely that was all it 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 you know at the necessity of human agency with all its high-level level functions and that is what is revolutionary about what he tries to do Turing'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 insights during 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 these into a language that machines could understand and with flawless impeccable logic Turing 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 shirring envisaged is what we would now call the memory of the computer but Turing didn't stop there Turing realized that feeding and machine instructions in this way had an amazing consequence it meant that just one machine is needed to perform almost any task who 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 Turing 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 Turing's 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 showing his dream has been realized so calculations making phone calls recording moving images writing letters listening to music all 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 Turing's amazing idea inside here are many many instructions what we'd call programs or software or apps there are nothing more than a long sequence of numbers telling the phone what to do what's amazing about Turing'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 [Music] this is a computer simulation of the large-scale structure of the entire universe and it reveals the true power of Turing's idea turning instructions into symbols that a machine can understand allows you to recreate not just a simple picture or sound but a process a system something that is changing and evolving by manipulating simple symbols computers are capable of capturing the essence the order of the natural world itself [Music] by thinking about how the human brain processes and computes information Alan Turing had had one of the most important ideas of the 20th century the power of information was revealing itself [Music] it will be very easy to think that after Turing's ideas were made real the true power of information would be unleashed but churring 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 will be dreamt up by a gifted and eccentric mathematician and 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 our 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 his 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 atmosphere was incredible people were playing and encouraged to play Lord Shannon in particular was given free rein to do pretty much whatever he wanted an electrically controlled Mouse oh they treated him as the darling I never saw him juggle but I certainly saw him right as unicycle he brought it to work one day and he must of course Bell Labs at at least a hundred man 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 amazingly their superstar employee Claude Shannon would give them exactly what they needed [Music] in this paper Shannon did something absolutely incredible he took the vague and mysterious concepts 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 unexpected and the more unexpected it is then more newsworthy it is so if today's news was the same as yesterday's news day there would be no news at all and the information content would be 0 so sudden you have a relationship between unexpectedness and information but Shannon was to go further and give information it's 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 [Music] Shannen realized that transforming information into binary digits would be an immensely powerful act it would make information manageable exact controllable and precise [Music] in his paper Shannon showed that a single binary digit one of these ones or zeros is 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 enormous leap our falaya [Music] the bit is the smallest quantity of information it is highly significant because it's the fundamental item it is the smallest unit of information in which there is 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 1 or 0 punched or not punched on or off stopped 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 states [Music] 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 you [Music] imagine how many bits of information you would need to describe this [Music] the beautiful and intricate interplay of physical laws taking place at scales and timeframes that are normally imperceptible to us [Music] but here you're still only seeing a fraction of the complexity of nature [Music] 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 Turing 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 inseparable part of the physical world [Music] it's a really difficult idea to get to grips with but information everything from a Beethoven 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 any effort information seemed to be able to break the laws of physics well that's not true it can't [Music] 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 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 record-keeping device is only finite size at some point the daemons gonna have to erase it that's an irreversible process that increases the entropy of the universe it's the erasure of information that increases entropy once and for all what was discovered is that there's a certain specific minimum amounts of energy known as the land hour limit that's required to delete one bits 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 [Music] Maxwell's thought experiments dreamt up in the age of steam still remains at the cutting edge of scientific research today [Music] 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 obeys the same laws of physics as everything else in the universe [Music] information is not just an abstraction just a mathematical thing or formula that you write on the paper actually information is carried by something so it's encoded onto something a stone a book a CD whatever there's a carrier where the informations on and that means that information behaves according to those laws of physics so it can all break the laws of physics what humanity has learnt over the last few millennia is that information can never be divorced from the physical world [Music] but this is not a hindrance 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 - 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 [Music] 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 be thought of as a blank canvas which we can use to build beauty structure and order [Music]

Channel: Spark

Views: 844,074

Rating: 4.8129592 out of 5

Keywords: order and disorder bbc documentary, order and disorder documentary, order and disorder, the science of information, jim al-khalili, information technology, science information technology, quantum physics, Science Lecture, coding documentary, bbc documentary, Spark, Science, Technology, Engineering, Learning, How To, education, documentary, factual, mind blown, construction, building, full documentary, full, space documentary, Science documentary

Id: qj7HH0PCqIE

Length: 58min 45sec (3525 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Nemick]

Any and all of his documentaries are extraordinarily good. I can’t wait for him to make more. I hope does.