The Ascent of Information is a book about the universe through the lens of information. Scharf describes in turn Shakespeare’s works, algorithms, and evolution in terms of information. I like Scharf’s style of writing—he’s both conversational and enlightening. He uses a lot of metaphors to introduce ideas, but never allows them to stray far from the ultimate explanation. Scharf tackles a lot of different ideas in this book—more than I had expected, since I found it sitting in the math section of the library.

Something that really stuck with me from The Ascent is that information follows the second law of thermodynamics. I’ve thought of information in terms of entropy or work before. Scharf explains it the relationship very well: you can do useful work using information, but it still takes energy to observe and record that information. Nothing escapes the second law.

Scharf’s writing on the relationship between biology and genetics starts diving into systems biology, where cells are viewed as small squishy computers. It was fun to read this, too. It’s a much more information and engineering-focused exploration of biology than other books I’ve read (like The Song of the Cell)