Alongside pieces on “Tax Reform,” “How to Get a Raise,” and “Olin, an Industrial Empire,” the December 1953 issue of Fortune magazine offered the mass public a first, digestible look at “The Information Theory.” Five years after the publication of Shannon’s paper in the Bell System Technical Journal, it had become the subject of a full-length feature in a magazine whose audience was made up of more than engineers and mathematicians. Francis Bello, Fortune’s technology editor and the writer of the piece, was to become one of Shannon’s champions in the popular press.
Bello’s article opened with a haymaker:
Great scientific theories, like great symphonies and great novels, are among man’s proudest—and rarest—creations. What sets the scientific theory apart from and, in a sense, above the other creations is that it may profoundly and rapidly alter man’s view of the world.
In this century man’s views, not to say his life, have already been deeply altered by such scientific insights as relatively theory and quantum theory. Within the last five years a new theory has appeared that seems to bear some of the same hallmarks of greatness. The new theory, still almost unknown to the general public, goes under either of two names: communication theory or information theory. Whether or not it will ultimately rank with the enduring great is a question now being resolved in a score of major laboratories here and abroad.
Though Shannon praised an early draft of the article, calling it a “bang-up job of scientific reporting,” he took characteristic exception to these two opening paragraphs. “Much as I wish it were so, communication theory is not in the same league with relativity and quantum mechanics. The first two paragraphs should be rewritten with a much more modest and realistic view of the importance of the theory.” Shannon also urged Bello to acknowledge Norbert Wiener for his contemporary work on cybernetics—and to make sure Bell Labs researchers were given their due.
Bello did give some credit to Wiener and others—but he did nothing to deflate information theory’s potential. He continued: “It may be no exaggeration to say that man’s progress in peace, and security in war, depend more on fruitful applications of information theory than on physical demonstrations, either in bombs or in power plants, that Einstein’s famous equation works.”
Comparisons to Einstein were to become a permanent fixture of Shannon’s public life. “Shannon is to communications as Einstein is to physics,” went a typical line, following Bello’s lead. When the town of Gaylord unveiled its Claude Shannon statue, the local paper remembered him as the “Gaylord native son . . . who will be revered forever as the Einstein of the mathematical theory of communication.” William Poundstone may have made the most memorable observation: “There were many at Bell Labs and MIT who compared Shannon’s insight to Einstein’s. Others found that comparison unfair—unfair to Shannon.” Despite Shannon’s protests, the similarities impressed themselves on his contemporaries: revolutionary theoretical work, a kind of playfulness of spirit, a curious combination of creative skill and the ability to stand apart from the prestige-soaked, ladder-climbing world of elite academia.
But Shannon had to acclimate himself to the praise. In June 1954, shortly after his piece, Bello included Shannon on a list of the twenty most important scientists in America. Beginning with the questions, “What kind of man becomes an outstanding scientist? Is there a widening gulf between him and the rest of society?” Bello interviewed more than 100 scientists and sent questionnaires to dozens more in search of answers.
Along with Shannon, the resulting list included a twenty-six-year-old, boyish-looking molecular biologist working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. Eight years later, at the age of thirty-four, James Watson won the Nobel Prize, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for discovering the double helix of DNA. Another of Bello’s profilees was a thirty-six-year-old wunderkind physicist. Richard Feynman, too, shared a Nobel in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics. In fact, one-quarter of the twenty scientists Bello singled out for recognition would go on to win that honor.
With similar encomia in Time, Life, and a host of other major publications, Shannon had reached the heights of scientific celebrity—in a postwar era in which the figure of “the Scientist” had itself reached its apex of cultural prestige.
The press, understandably, was as interested in the curious man behind the new theory of information as it was in the theory itself. Shannon seems to have taken public recognition of his work with a kind of bemused detachment, as in this interview with Omni:
OMNI: Did you feel you were destined for fame?
SHANNON: I don’t think so. I always thought I was quite sharp scientifically, but scientists by and large don’t get the press that politicians or authors or other people do. I thought my paper on switching was quite good, and I got a prize for it, and I thought my information paper was very good, and I got all kinds of acclaim for that—there’s a wallful of prizes and stuff in the other room.
OMNI: Do you find fame a burden?
SHANNON: Not too much. I have people like you coming and wasting my afternoons, but that isn’t too much of a burden!
By the mid-1950s, Shannon’s work had been celebrated in the popular press and applied in a diverse array of fields, sometimes with only the loosest appreciation for what information theory actually meant. For theoretical work as suggestive as information theory—which to a casual reader might appear to offer a rubric for everything from mass media to geology—appropriation and misappropriation were inevitable. For instance: “Birds clearly have the problem of communicating in the presence of noise,” ran one contemporary paper. “An examination of birdsong on the basis of information theory might . . . suggest new types of field experiment and analysis.” Invoking “information theory,” like any fashionable term, was often a shortcut to research funding. At the same time, the elegance and simplicity of Shannon’s theory made it an attractive tool across disciplines. Even if the potential for overuse had troubled him, the normally conflict-averse Shannon might have been expected to simply laugh, shrug his shoulders, and move on to other problems. In the main, this is mostly what he did—with one important exception.
In 1955, Louis A. de Rosa, the chairman of the Institute of Radio Engineers’ Professional Group on Information Theory, published an editorial in the group’s newsletter. De Rosa’s “In Which Fields Do We Graze?” was a genuine query of his colleagues working in information theory:
The expansion of the applications of Information Theory to fields other than radio and wired communications has been so rapid that oftentimes the bounds within which the Professional Group interests lie are questioned. . . . Should an attempt be made to extend our interests to such fields as management, biology, psychology, and linguistic theory, or should the concentration be strictly in the direction of communication by radio or wire?
Shannon himself took to the pages of IRE’s journal to address the matter in a brief pronouncement titled “The Bandwagon.” The 573-word response begins: “Information theory has, in the last few years, become something of a scientific bandwagon. Starting as a technical tool for the communication engineer, it has received an extraordinary amount of publicity in the popular as well as the scientific press.” Shannon allowed that the popularity was, at least in part, due to information theory’s hovering place on the edges of so many of the era’s hottest fields—“computing machines, cybernetics, and automation”—as well as to its sheer novelty.
And yet, he continued, “it has perhaps been ballooned to an importance beyond its actual accomplishments. Our fellow scientists in many different fields, attracted by the fanfare and by the new avenues opened to scientific analysis, are using these ideas in their own problems. . . . In short, information theory is currently partaking of a somewhat heady draught of general popularity.” Shannon was willing to concede that all of the momentary attention was “pleasant and exciting.” Still,
it carries at the same time an element of danger. While we feel that information theory is indeed a valuable tool in providing fundamental insights into the nature of communication problems and will continue to grow in importance, it is certainly no panacea for the communication engineer or, a fortiori, for anyone else. Seldom do more than a few of nature’s secrets give way at one time.
Seldom do more than a few of nature’s secrets give way at one time. It’s a remarkable statement from someone who still had a full career ahead of him, someone who, in a practical sense, had every incentive to encourage information theory’s inflation. Yet here was Shannon pulling on the reins. He continued: “It will be all too easy for our somewhat artificial prosperity to collapse overnight when it is realized that the use of a few exciting words like information, entropy, redundancy, do not solve all our problems.”
In place of all this feverish excitement, Shannon counseled moderation:
Workers in other fields should realize that the basic results of the subject are aimed in a very specific direction, a direction that is not necessarily relevant to such fields as psychology, economics, and other social sciences. Indeed, the hard core of information theory is, essentially, a branch of mathematics, a strictly deductive system. . . . I personally believe that many of the concepts of information theory will prove useful in these other fields—and, indeed, some results are already quite promising—but the establishing of such applications is not a trivial matter of translating words to a new domain, but rather the slow tedious process of hypothesis and experimental verification.
Above all, he advised his colleagues that
we must keep our own house in first class order. The subject of information theory has certainly been sold, if not oversold. We should now turn our attention to the business of research and development at the highest scientific plane we can maintain. Research rather than exposition is the keynote, and our critical thresholds should be raised. Authors should submit only their best efforts, and these only after careful criticism by themselves and their colleagues. A few first rate research papers are preferable to a large number that are poorly conceived or half-finished. The latter are no credit to their writers and a waste of time to their reader.
The editorial, and others that agreed with Shannon’s position, had the intended effect. Robert Gallager offered this observation about Shannon’s approach to conflict: “Claude Shannon was a very gentle person who believed in each person’s right to follow his or her own path. If someone said something particularly foolish in a conversation, Shannon had a talent for making a reasonable reply without making the person appear foolish.” Given that habitual restraint, the “Bandwagon” editorial was a telling statement. That he was moved to write such a piece showed his true depth of concern over the use and abuse of information theory—and his worries that, instead of birthing a new field of science, he had only inflated a speculative bubble.
Betty Shannon confessed that Shannon was perhaps more frustrated than even the editorial let on: “He got a little irritated with the way people were pulling it around. People didn’t understand what he was trying to do.” Robert Fano would go further, citing his own frustration as well as Shannon’s: “I didn’t like the term Information Theory. Claude didn’t like it either. You see, the term ‘information theory’ suggests that it is a theory about information—but it’s not. It’s the transmission of information, not information. Lots of people just didn’t understand this.”
For Shannon, useful, informed applications of information theory were always welcome. But claims for its hyperimportance—attempts to position it as the century’s Key to All Mythologies—invariably rested on the kinds of airy generalities and lazy philosophizing that he scorned. Here was the real danger: that the ideas he had set in motion might become so diffuse so as to lose all meaning. That danger is, perhaps, a risk inherent to any revolution in scientific thought. But Shannon felt compelled to do his part to ward it off. His work had opened a theoretical and metaphorical Pandora’s box. “The Bandwagon” was his attempt to shut the lid, discipline the discipline, and remind at least the engineering world that the theory he had pioneered—and the work that had made him famous—could only remain meaningful within its own proper bounds.