Pursuing the 17th-Century Origins of the Hacker's Grail: Waterhouse's project is imagined by Neal Stephenson in his gargantuan 927-page historical novel, "Quicksilver," to be published next week. But the project also derives from one imagined by the 17th-century philosopher Leibniz and that still lives on in varied incarnations.
For if all the world's knowledge could be encoded in number, then the acts of creation and invention would just be forms of calculation. And the world would reveal itself as a calculating machine, an information processor.
In Mr. Stephenson's book, Waterhouse's stacks tumble down like a house of cards, which is probably a demonstration of how impossible this dream is to realize, but it still haunts contemporary computer culture. What is the hacker, after all, but someone who is a master of number and code? What is the hacker's power, but the ability to affect the engines of commerce simply by manipulating number? The hacker controls the material world by mastering its code, a notion that has become familiar from the "Matrix" films.
[act.: The Metaweb: is a collaborative structure for learning. In our first phase, we are annotating the ideas and historical period explored in Neal Stephenson's novel Quicksilver, seeding the Metaweb with an initial base of information. We are currently working on 116 articles, and hope you will expand and relate these and many other entries.]
