In 1837, English mathematician Charles Babbage drafted a steam-powered device that could calculate numbers through a binary system of levers. This was, essentially, the first computer.

Plan diagram of the Analytical Engine, 1840

Babbage, being both a poet and inventor, believed that no motion is obliterated, with energy feeding off its original entropy through all eternity. The laws of thermodynamics agree. Each atom, once disturbed, communicates its state to all others, and they in turn influence waves of air. No impulse is entirely lost.

“The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful will.”
– Babbage, "Exhumed and Exhaled”

Babbage illustrates thought as physical particles. When each action has a branching and eternal reaction, actions become immortal. These particles serve as a form of encryption, with each spoken word encoded in the vast atmosphere. The universe (which others call the library) takes a literal form. If these exertions of energy are recorded physically, could they be accessed by a decryption device? Could we, like a Librarian in Babel, access all information suspended above us? When two atomic particles are entangled, the qualities of one particle depend on another, no matter what physical barrier lies between them. When you know something about one of these particles, you immediately know something about the other, even if they are millions of light years apart. They are intrinsically linked with an invisible wire.

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