The Library of Babel (Spoiler Alert) It seems appropriate to start out with “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges. In this strange and eerie tale the narrator describes how his universe consists of an unfathomably large number of adjacent hexagonal rooms, each containing walls of bookshelves. The books are filled with random gibberish, generated from 25 basic characters (22 letters, the period, the comma and the space). Each book contains the same number of pages, each with the same number of lines containing the same number of characters. Eventually it is revealed that the library contains every book of that form that could possibly exist. A really big number: approximately 1,956 followed by one million eight hundred and thirty four thousand and ninety four zeros. The library thus contains all useful information, an admittedly infinitesimal fraction of the total books. It contains the true story of your death as well as uncounted trillions of false stories of your death. Aside from its eerie charm, the story always struck me as framing really interesting questions about the nature of information.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 02:31:15 +0000
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