Information Era

``By the end of the year, the story of this wholesale security breach had outgrown the story of the actual contents of the secret documents and generated much breathless speculation that something — journalism, diplomacy, life as we know it — had profoundly changed forever.''

NYT

There is a lull in Chilpancingo, this is finals week. I am mesmerized by this man, Julian Assange; smart, savvy, a real character from a spy fiction thriller, as if from a  Stieg Larsson story.

From the same article by Bill Keller linked above:

``I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson thriller — a man who could figure either as hero or villain in one of the megaselling Swedish novels that mix hacker counterculture, high-level conspiracy and sex as both recreation and violation.''

I hadn't read Mr. Keller to come to the same conclusion. Interesting, eh?

To me, though; the most important story from the WikiLeaks saga, is the role of information .

Given a pool table, we have Mass, the billiard balls, Energy, the motion of the balls, and Information, how the balls move. These are categories.

We only concentrate on the first two, as a matter of fact, the second was not even conceptualized until Thermodynamics was invented. The Law of Conservation of Energy, or First Law of Thermodynamics, is a pillar of Modern Physics.  My point is that similarly, Information was late to the game. Only after Ludwig Boltzmann, connected the thermodynamic concept of Entropy with probability, did physicists and chemist had a clue of what Information was. Enter Claude Shannon, at Bell Labs in Holmdel, and we have the dawn of the Information Era, that literally exploded in front of our own eyes, when Mr. Assange dropped his bomb, his Information bomb on Sunday, July 25, 2010.

In February he is due in London  court. Even if they stop him; they are many Assanges all over the world, like human mirrors. Smart principled young people that have tasted triumph.

The genie is out of the bottle.