Instant Genius - The fascinating history of science

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

We may pride ourselves on our intelligence, but humans perhaps actually have to thank our ability to process and communicate information for our species’ success. In this episode, we speak to ‘The History of Information’ author Chris Haughton about the evolutionary adaptations, technologies and moments in our history that propelled us forward – and what he thinks is coming next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. This is Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form, and I'm Noah Leach, special projects editor at BBC Science Focus. As a species, we may pride ourselves on our intelligence, but we humans may have our ability to process and communicate information to thank for our success.

In this episode, we speak to Chris Horton, the author of the new book, The History of Information, about the evolutionary adaptations, technologies, and moments in our history that propelled us forward and what he thinks is coming next. So Chris, in your book, you talk about how it's perhaps not intelligence that's made humans so developed, but actually the sharing of information. Could you unpack that for us a bit? Yeah, so I came to this story through a series of lectures from UC Berkeley. in the very first lecture, they asked this question, why does technology improve? Why every year do we get better phones and better internet and better computers?

And this has been a feature of our entire history. Why is that? And all the students kind of came back with these different answers. You know, we have better materials. We have more experience, making tools, all of these things. And in the end, the lecturer, Jeff, came back and said, well, it's information. We have better ways of collecting information and that has been improving throughout the years and this course will be about the history of information and that became my book,

the history of information. Thank you and it's a fascinating history but I think that most of us perceived that history as a kind of happening super slowly and then suddenly all at once. I mean, we all think that we were there as cavemen doing pretty much nothing and not really talking about anything except maybe today's catch or whatever. And now it's just snowballed into this, you know, social media, then AI, and we can't keep up with it. But from your research and perhaps from those lectures, is that truly representative of this development of our sharing of information, the pace, I mean? Yeah. Well, I think in each era, we always sort of felt that this was, we're being overwhelmed with information now. And that's true of, you know, sort of 500 years ago.

people were saying that the same thing. But it's true, we are accelerating enormously. And that's because the different information technologies have sort of built on each other and have in effect snowballs. You know, really very few people were literate. It was just a handful of people within society who kept this knowledge and kept it for society. And then printing opened it up to everyone or almost everyone. And of course, more and more printing, the printing technology improved. It started industrialising. So we have steamroller, roller printers. Yeah, we've become flooded with print text. And it's continued since then, you know, mass media, social media, the internet, AI. We'll get onto as many of those as we can, because obviously we're talking about a whole

human history worth of information. But let's go back to the beginning for now. So you talk about the origins of information being rooted in language. Sounds obvious when I say it, but it's not actually something that we really think about how language came about. So could you tell us a bit more about language and how it developed and how that earliest information started to be shared? Yeah, well, we have this incredible facility for language. Someone in university has around a vocabulary of 40,000 words, that means they've been, in effect, learning a word every three waking hours, you know, from the age of one to 18. It's just kind of incredible facility. It's just ethereal. It just disappears. And so the only way we have to record that is with our

memory, with our minds. So all of the knowledge that we have from this period has these very memorable traits. So, you know, when we think back to sort of the Greek myths and the Roman myths, and they have very strange, peculiar characters and very memorable deeds. And these are the sort of traits that we remember. So it's only the stories that are very memorable that get to live to be passed on. And so these mythological traits can be seen. across all over the world, you know, in every region, these very unusual stories. And, yeah, mythological means from the mouth that's, you know, unwritten. And also ceremonies is very important in language.

Without written documents, things need to be remembered, you know, property rights, marriages, coronations, all of these things. We gather lots of people, so there's lots of minds there recording the end, whatever's going on. when we do start to put kind of pen to paper, so to speak, more rudimentarily, I suppose. What kind of form does that take? Is it cave paintings that kind of kicks it all off with drawings or, you know, what comes first? Yeah, well, I mean, we started drawing, the first figurative drawing that we know of is 45,000 years old, and that's in Sumatra, in Indonesia. interestingly, the first deliberate marks are 200,000 years old, and that's in a cave in Tibet. And we think that's a seven-year-old and a 12-year-old basically mucking about, you know,

they've got sort of mud or dye on their hands, and they're just pressing it against the cave wall and their hands and their feet. And it's interesting because, so the mark-making, basically, in effect, was kind of invented by children. you know, it looks like. And a lot of the technologies as we go through the history of information are actually invented by children. So later on we have radio and radio was thought of as this two-way communication system like a telephone. And it was just because children got, and young teenagers got kind of obsessed with listening to these ships across in the ocean and they were making their own little radio receivers. And it became an obsession. It became a, a real hobby and this came about and and then radio manufacturers thought oh well we can make these

receivers ourselves so they made the receivers and then the first radio manufacturer made a radio show to promote the receivers so radio and also social media actually evolved from a multiplayer messaging system within the computer game so this idea actually kind of evolved also through children and playing. So it's kind of like early adopters, you know, the children are first to sort of, you know, grab the device and go, okay, what can we do with this? I'd love to come more onto some of those machines and those collaborations actually in a bit. But speaking of the innovators, when does science start to be communicated? When does information in a more statistical or factual or observational way start to get gathered and recorded in human history? Well, you could kind of choose,

at any date really? I mean, we have, of course, the Greeks and logic and reasoning, which kind of evolves from the first laws, you know, having these laws written down and then saying, you know, who is guilty or not guilty, that kind of evolves into what is true and what is false. Then we have, I mean, he's often considered the first scientist, Ibn al-Haitam, who wrote this book called the Book of optics and he was really sort of one of the first people to do scientific experiments and he was looking at light and arguing that actually light it was believed that light our eyes had this sort of sense that came out of our eyes and but actually he argued that no no no it's light is coming into our eyes and he proved that and so he wrote this book and this was around 1,000 a d and that

became very influential. 500 years later, it was printed in Europe and Leonardo da Vinci redrew some of Al Haitham's diagrams in his sketchbooks and became very influential with perspective. But really, it's when

printing comes along that we start seeing all of the scientific revolution. You know, we have Bacon talking about, you know, induction and inductive reasoning. and then we have Descartes talking about deductive reasoning.

And all of these different things, we start thinking about how do we come to knowledge? And this is the start of the scientific revolution. Then magazines and newspapers that focused on these different bodies of knowledge and fields. So the Royal Society emerges and their magazine, the philosophical transactions, basically all comes out of a coffee shop and they all met this one coffee shop and I think it was called the Grecian and they exchanged knowledge and they did so openly and published knowledge and this then completely revolutionized the way we sort of share knowledge and still today you know we when we're sharing scientific knowledge it's published and then reviewed and so this all comes from that from that

time. So that's the kind of history, that's the origins of journals, is it, kind of scientific journals as well? Scientific journals and, yeah, peer reviewing and, you know, validating knowledge. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the next, to keep the network flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus

taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio, and trocal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, name and focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing. the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture.

Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. I really enjoyed learning in your book that the earliest libraries were actually in China. and then when the printing press comes to Europe, obviously there's that huge revolution that you talked about. But how many of those early books were science books?

Yeah, I mean, we were trying to do science. We were trying to get the best knowledge we could. And, you know, one of the first encyclopedias or, you know, attempts to make an encyclopedia was by Pliny. And, you know, he describes all sorts of crazy things. You know, there's a creature with one very large foot. who, you know, he shades himself from the sun with his large foot and other people with dog heads that sort of live near the edge of the world. So this was around 2,000 years ago. So it was, you know, trying to gather the best knowledge available, but, you know, a little bit hit and

miss. And then, I mean, yeah, the Youngler Encyclopedia, that was written, I think it was 1400. that was the largest encyclopedia until Wikipedia came along. Absolutely enormous body of knowledge. And it sounds like from what you've described there that a lot of our early scientific interests were ourselves anatomically in our experience of the world, which makes sense. But does that actually represent what some of those early observations are about? Were we interested in, well, you talked about the crazy animal that blocks out the sun? Was it mostly human and natural history? were we interested in astronomy and space and things going on beyond Earth and our day-to-day lives? Oh, yeah. Well, really, I mean, I think the obsession from very early on in Sumer was the planets.

And, you know, we had this intuition that the planets are very, very important. So there's five observable planets and then plus the sun and the moon makes seven. And so seven was this sacred number. And so that's where we get the days of the week from is from those all around the world. Because their knowledge, Sumerians, who were the first people to write? So they were the first people really to collect knowledge like this. And so who are the Sumerians? Yeah.

So they're from present day Iraq. And the very first city, Uruk, was the largest settlement on earth for a very long time for thousands of years. and it had around, I think it was 40,000 people by three or four thousand BC, massive city, and they need its ways of accounting and taxing. So they invented money and they invented writing with it. And a lot of the innovations that we have today came from this, you know, literally this one city back in those days. So the plow, the sail, the wheel, it's absolutely incredible. They basically gave us civilization. Let's move on to medicine. So given our fascination with ourselves as well as these extraordinary,

extraterrestrial things, how did medicine rise as a practice? And how good were we at sharing what we knew about bodies and how to fix them, essentially? Well, the first hospitals actually also came along in Iraq. And I think by about 1,000 AD, Iraq had four free hospitals. And they did all sorts of things that, you know, was just kind of unheard of in Europe. They invented the plaster casts for healing broken limbs. And while in Europe, we were basically doing more harm than good. There was a medical school base. on Islamic knowledge opened in Salerno in Italy, in the south of Italy. And it had then a

fantastic reputation, lots of people, kings and people would come to get healed from that. And the knowledge then spread from there. So yeah, also our medical information came from the Islamic world as well. So we've mentioned the printing press quite a lot and that obviously is quite a key marker in this time. And I was thinking about all the other things that we had invented and invention seems quite a big part of this. So obviously there's scientific instruments in there. There's microscope telescope and you talked before about the invention of the radio and how that came about. So the kind of history seems to be mirrored in the media, the development of these media instruments and while also the scientific instruments and they're going hand in hand. So could you talk a bit more about what you

found about some of these instruments, like which ones come to mind as truly significant ones other than the printing press? Well, a very interesting invention was the invention of the alphabet, which we don't really kind of think of as an invention. But actually, there's a strange thing with a lot of this sort of information technology, that it's just, it's a tool for the mind, really, rather than a technological tool, as we'd think of. So this invention of the alphabet helped record knowledge. Before we had ways of representing sound, our way of writing was just so clunky.

You know, we need to do a separate drawing for every thing. And some things are very difficult to picture. You know, you can do a picture for man. You can do a picture for woman. but how do you draw a picture for brother or foreigner or any of these things? So they have these very elaborate combination meanings, which then takes an awful long time to learn, and it's like learning a second or even third language.

The alphabet, just this idea of representing sound means that you only have about, you know, 25 up to 30 or whatever little symbols that you can learn off in a day or two, and that represents all of the sounds of our language. So the alphabet comes from in Egypt, around 4,000 years ago. They drew this little ox head to represent Alpa, which was their name for ox. And that ox head was a little triangle with two horns,

turned its way around to the side and then upside down, and that became our A. And then Bet similarly was a picture of a house, and that evolved into our capital B. And this was a massive thing because suddenly then writing was so much easier and more people could engage and record knowledge. So you talk about some of the key scientific figures in the past

and one of these, keeping on a kind of medical theme, was the mathematician John Grant, whose analysis may, I think you said, be one of the first examples of the use of statistics. Could you tell us a bit more about him? Yeah, so I think it was in 1600. London started collecting the data on people who had died, you know, in the period. And I think it was monthly.

And they were called the Bills of Mortality. And some of them are very funny, actually. There's under F, there's found dead in a ditch in Stepney. And then the same month, there was 27 people died of teeth, just as teeth. Oh, God. And so, you know, they're quite funny and pretty tragic. But after about 60 years, they had a lot of data on deaths that happened in London. And John Grunt was the statistician, or, well, was the first statistician.

It was a mathematician who became interested in all of these numbers and looked at this huge amount of data. And he published a book called Observations on the Bills of Mortality. and he did statistical analysis on the deaths, and really it was the very first one to do that. And this was very useful to have the Bills of Mortality to begin with because there was a lot of plagues around this time, and so they could see if a plague might be breaking out. So it was very much like how we were dealing with data during the COVID times.

But John Grant did this statistical analysis, and all sorts of things came from that. In fact, Christian Hoygens did the very first graph drawing based on some texts about mortality, human mortality, that Grant had worked out. So this is the very first graph of graphing data, visualization of data. And really, that is the most useful tool we have today in medicine

And in many things, you know, the connection between smoking and cancer, that came from statistical analysis. You know, it's only by looking at, oh, these people were smokers and they also happened to have lung cancer. You know, maybe there is a connection. And this still today is our most powerful sort of medical tool. And it comes from this mathematician who had this idea back in 1660 in London. Jumping forward to the present, we kind of think about information, increasing the authority of science. We've got all of this data, thanks to that history of people like John Grant, to back up scientific study. But media is also great for spreading misinformation.

You talk about there have been things in the past about misinformation, like the great moon hoax, and we see a lot of false science on TikTok. But do you think that this is much different from the past? Are we seeing a lot more truth but a lot more untruth? Or is it quite in keeping with the kind of alchemists promoting their life- prolonging elixies and things like that? Yeah, I'm afraid to say, I think we haven't really changed very much. I mean, yes, there's an awful lot more information out there. But whoever is in control of the information is able to sort of, you know, do very well from it and hold a monopoly on information.

We only have time for one final question. So I just wanted to ask you, Chris, if we thought innovation was moving fast before, it definitely feels like it's super fast now. So turning to the future, obviously everyone has opinions and projections and concerns about AI. But what do you think based on the history of information? What's your take on AI? Every new technology has this been sort of race for control. And now it's about collecting the information.

itself. And, you know, we've seen this throughout history, you know, this sort of race for dominance. But at the same time, if we know that this is what is happening, we can change it at any moment. And I quote Marshall McLuhan quite a bit in the book, but he has this fantastic quote. There's absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. So that's the beauty of information and the way that we operate. You know, although it looks pretty bad, you know, at the moment and it has the potential for some pretty unpleasant stuff, we can change it at any point once we have those debates and we have to have them openly, I think.

That was Chris Horton, author of the new book, The History of Information. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine. By the latest issue of Science Focus in your favourite shop or visit us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal. Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Relax and let Ralph's delivery

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