Sunday, November 1, 2009
Gottfried Leibniz laid the modern foundation of the movement from decimal to binary as far back as 1666 with his 'On the Art of Combination', laying out a method for reducing all logic to exact statements.
Leibniz believed logic, or ‘the laws of thought’ could be moved from a verbal state - which was subject to the ambiguities of language, tone and circumstance - into an absolute mathematical condition:
"A sort of universal language or script, but infinitely different from all those projected hitherto, for the symbols and even words in it would direct the reason, and errors, except for those of fact, would be mere mistakes in calculation. It would be very difficult to form or invent this language or characteristic, but very easy to understand it without any dictionaries."
The concept was a bit high-flown for his time, and Leibniz' idea was ignored by the scientific community of his day. He let his proposition drop - until about ten years later when the Chinese 'Book of Changes', or 'I Ching', came his way.
Leibniz found some sort of confirmation for his theories in the I Ching's depiction of the universe as a progression of contradicting dualities, a series of on-off, yes-no possibilities, such as dark-light and male-female, which formed the complex interaction of life and consciousness. He reasoned that, if life itself could be reduced to a series of straightforward propositions, so could thought, or logic.
Heartened by his new insights, Leibniz set out to refine his rudimentary binary system, studiously transposing numerals into seemingly infinite rows of ones and zeros - even though he couldn't really find a use for them.
Leibniz believed logic, or ‘the laws of thought’ could be moved from a verbal state - which was subject to the ambiguities of language, tone and circumstance - into an absolute mathematical condition:
"A sort of universal language or script, but infinitely different from all those projected hitherto, for the symbols and even words in it would direct the reason, and errors, except for those of fact, would be mere mistakes in calculation. It would be very difficult to form or invent this language or characteristic, but very easy to understand it without any dictionaries."
The concept was a bit high-flown for his time, and Leibniz' idea was ignored by the scientific community of his day. He let his proposition drop - until about ten years later when the Chinese 'Book of Changes', or 'I Ching', came his way.
Leibniz found some sort of confirmation for his theories in the I Ching's depiction of the universe as a progression of contradicting dualities, a series of on-off, yes-no possibilities, such as dark-light and male-female, which formed the complex interaction of life and consciousness. He reasoned that, if life itself could be reduced to a series of straightforward propositions, so could thought, or logic.
Heartened by his new insights, Leibniz set out to refine his rudimentary binary system, studiously transposing numerals into seemingly infinite rows of ones and zeros - even though he couldn't really find a use for them.
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