From individual insight to collective knowledge In the winter of 1676, Isaac Newton wrote a letter to Robert Hooke that contained one of the most quoted sentences in the history of science: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The sentence is usually read as a gesture of… Read more

A thermostat that almost thinks A thermostat on the wall is doing something that, described carefully, sounds a great deal like thinking. It senses the temperature of the room. It holds a target it has been given. And when the two drift apart it acts, clicking the heating on until the gap closes and clicking… Read more

What it cannot say In 1960, the physicist Eugene Wigner published an essay with a title that has become one of the most quoted in the philosophy of science: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Wigner’s puzzle was genuine and has not been resolved in the 65 years since he posed it…. Read more

Categories, definitions, and the preconditions for communication There is a word that has appeared in political discourse with increasing frequency over the past two decades, and whose use in that discourse has produced a peculiar effect. The word is “violence.” In its traditional usage, violence refers to the physical harm of persons: the infliction of… Read more

The miracle and the mess In 1948, a mathematician at Bell Telephone Laboratories named Claude Shannon published a paper that changed, in a single stroke, what it was possible to think about communication. Shannon was not interested in the meaning of messages: he was explicit about this from the first pages of his paper, which… Read more