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document consisted mainly of pages and pages of Wiener’s fiendishly complex mathematics and was circulated to workers on the various anti-aircraft projects. Even the briefest chapter, which was only six pages long, contained thirty-seven equations. Stamped ‘Restricted’, the document was printed in 300 copies and was bound in pale yellow covers that carried a declaration threatening anyone who revealed its contents with the full force of the US Espionage Act. It soon became known to its many perplexed readers as the Yellow Peril – one US engineer later said, ‘copies should have been distributed to the enemy so that they would have to devote such time to it and enable us to get on with winning the war.’ 14 The document was eventually declassified and has since become a classic of its kind; in 2005 a copy sold at Sotheby’s for $7,200.
    Wiener claimed that his method had many applications and could shed important light on the nature of communication. He argued that there was no difference between human communication and messages sent by a machine: ‘the records of current and voltage kept on the instruments of an automatic substation are as truly messages as a telephone conversation.’ 15 All communication possesses the same fundamental feature, argued Wiener – it has to contain what he termed variable information. One measure of that variability, he said, could be found in the mathematical theory of probability – all forms of communication could be understood in terms of a mathematical, probabilistic analysis of the information they contained. When Wiener’s two fundamental insights – the importance of negative feedback in shaping behaviour, and the existence of information – were combined, it implied that the feedback loops that lay at the heart of apparently purposive behaviour were carrying information.
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    Another MIT-trained mathematician called Claude E. Shannon was working on similar problems at the same time. Shannon was a shy young man with a lifelong love of Dixieland jazz who enjoyed tinkering with electronics and spoke with a slow drawl, a bit like James Stewart. In 1938 Shannon obtained his MSc from MIT for his work on applications of Boolean logic, which played a decisive role in the development of electronics. By 1940, Shannon had completed his PhD on ‘An algebra for theoretical genetics’, in which he developed a mathematical way of describing how genes spread in populations. As Shannon admitted, although the proof was novel, the results were not. He was not actually interested in genes at all – according to his doctoral advisor, Vannevar Bush, ‘he has only a fragmentary knowledge of this aspect of genetics’. His primary concern was with using statistics to describe the behaviour of genes in populations, not how they functioned or what they were made of. 16
    By 1942, Shannon was working for Bell Laboratories in their New York headquarters on West Street, overlooking the Hudson River. At the rear, on Washington Street, an overground subway line ran right through the building, like something out of a 1930s film of the future. Shannon was part of the cryptography group, studying the transmission of messages over the telephone. In January 1943, as Schrödinger was about to give his lectures in Dublin, the Bell Labs had a visitor from England – the mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing, who had arrived in New York on the
Queen Elizabeth
in November. Turing began work at Bell Labs, investigating ways of setting up a securely encoded telephone link between Roosevelt and Churchill – this was later successfully implemented after Shannon’s theoretical demonstration that the code could not be broken. 17
    Although Turing did not work with Shannon, the two young men regularly had tea together in the cafeteria, where they discussed Turing’s ideas for a ‘universal machine’ that could perform any conceivable calculation. Shannon apparently surprised Turing by suggesting that