Silence on the Wire

Toward the Material World

There is nothing complex about the mechanism devised by Boole: it calls for two opposite logic states, “true” and “false,” 0 and 1, “cyan” and “purple,” 999 and 999 ½. The actual meaning, the physical representation, and the medium are irrelevant; what matters is the arbitrarily chosen convention that assigns certain states of the medium to a specific set of logic values.

Computers as we know them use two different voltage levels in an electronic circuit and interpret them as values their designers refer to as 0 and 1. These values, which are carried through the electric circuit, represent two digits in the binary system—but nothing is stopping a person from using just about any method to convey the data, from water flow, ...