“The universe (which others call the Library)...” begins Borges’ 1941 speculation in his short story “The Library of Babel”.

Imagine a space of an infinite number of identical hexagonal galleries layered forever above and below you. Each hexagon room has walls filled with bookshelves– 20 total– which are stacked floor to ceiling with the ceiling being your exact height (a little cramped). The two walls of the hexagon are portals to the next identical gallery– a pathway you could follow endlessly.

Jamie Zawinski, Sketchup rendering of Library of Babel (2016)

The architecture of the Library of Babel is not what makes it special. The books in these shelves contain every possible artifact of knowledge hidden between text of pure gibberish. These excerpts are organized in a way where each piece of information has a direct connection to any other, if one is willing to dedicate an eternity to finding it. These hexagonal nodes can also be thought of as analogous to web pages.

The library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable. It is in a constant state of change and becoming. “Neither the Library nor the Internet has a fixed center. The Library is in a constant flux since each time a book is read it establishes connections to novel experiences and thus new links are established to other works" (Sasson). It contains all combinations of information including predictions of branching futures. This is compared to Borel’s infinite monkey theorem, in which monkeys hitting keys on a typewriter at random would, in an eternity, type out any known text.

For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency. No knowledge can be discovered in the library of Babel because it is shelved indefinitely with all other knowledge, including all falsehood. It’s a virtual copy of the universe, including its inherent flaws. “In the mirrored galleries, on the countless shelves, can be found everything and nothing. There can be no more perfect case of information glut” (Gleick). Searching for truth is futile because it is sat right beside all lies; In sum, this universe which contains all possibilities ends up with zero useful information.

The Tower of Babel in Genesis is afflicted with the same curse. All humans once spoke a single language. When they started to build the Tower of Babel to reach the heavens, God, not wanting them to grasp divinity, fragmented their universal language into multiple dialects so that they could never communicate. With no way to continue building the tower, they dispersed across the Earth and formed divided nations. Babel– both Library and Tower– is a place of information wealth to the point of uselessness. Physicists researching quantum computing came up with a term for this phenomena: The Babel Effect, which concludes that “exponential wealth of information is ruined, over time, by exponential dilution.” (Castagnoli). Information loses meaning in overabundance.

If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder-which, repeated, becomes order: the Order. The goal of defining the laws of Physics is to find an underlying set of rules that all beings adhere to– from the smallest particles to the vastest universes. These rules are hidden, our limits of observation keeping them just out of reach. One can only catch the patterns, the universal laws, by looking at the entirety.

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