Statistics Documentary of the day

The Joy of Data hosted by Hannah Fry- available on Curiosity Stream.

Before the publication of his “Mathematical Theory of Communication,” scientists could track the movement of electrons in a wire, but the possibility that the very idea they stood for could be measured and manipulated just as objectively would have to wait until it was proved by Shannon. It was summed up in his recognition that all information, no matter the source, the sender, the recipient, or the meaning, could be efficiently represented by a sequence of bits: information’s fundamental unit.

Before the “Mathematical Theory of Communication,” a century of common sense and engineering trial and error said that noise — the physical world’s tax on our messages — had to be lived with. And yet Shannon proved that noise could be defeated, that information sent from Point A could be received with perfection at Point B, not just often, but essentially always. He gave engineers the conceptual tools to digitize information and send it flawlessly (or, to be precise, with an arbitrarily small amount of error), a result considered hopelessly utopian up until the moment Shannon proved it was not. Another engineer marveled, “How he got that insight, how he even came to believe such a thing, I don’t know.”

That insight is embedded in the circuits of our phones, our computers, our satellite TVs, our space probes still tethered to the earth with thin cords of 0’s and 1’s. In 1990, the Voyager 1 probe turned its camera back on Earth from the edge of the solar system, snapped a picture of our planetary home reduced in size to less than a single pixel — to what Carl Sagan called “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” — and transmitted that picture across four billion miles of void. Claude Shannon did not write the code that protected that image from error and distortion, but, some four decades earlier, he had proved that such a code must exist. And so it did. It is part of his legacy; and so is the endless flow of digital information on which the Internet depends, and so is the information omnivory by which we define ourselves as modern..

Soni, Jimmy. A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age