Enlightenment, Information, and the Copernican Delay

This essay pursues the history of knowledge in the form of what Francis Bacon called a "literary history"-a "story of learning" that tracks "the antiquities and originals of knowledges." It focuses on the changing interrelations of information and knowledge from the seventeenth century to the present day in order to identify a fundamental continuity in a knowledge project that links the Enlightenment to our own era of quantum computation. At the core of that project has been Bacon's and Robert Boyle's dreams of re-making the world through a "handshake" between the intellectual and physical worlds. Quantum theory tells us that the lingua franca that realizes that handshake is information. I track that realization from the simultaneous emergence of newspapers and modern science 350 years ago to today's moment of fake news and quantum computation. In doing so, I identify a feature of the history of knowledge that is applicable to other ventures into that history: a taxonomy of "delays" in explanatory knowledge caused by mismatches between concepts and technologies

Enlightenment · Episteme · Epistemology · Handshake · Intellectual history · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Sociology · Computer Science · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy