Imagine a library of books which contains each and every piece of information about the past, present, and future of every person; each and every scientific discovery or invention ever found or will be found in the future; everything we say or going to speak will be there in that library. Yes! Such kind of library exists and is called the LIBRARY OF BABEL. With this, we can unravel the universe and uncover the best works of art. We could even have every history that was lost to time’s decay, and we would have an overview of each possible future for each person alive today (and also everyone who may yet be born). In short, it might contain an accurate account of our death.
Library
Of Babel is a website built by Jonathan Basile that currently offers everything
that has been or could be written seriously, divided into pages. It is built to
produce and locate on demand any 3,200 character combination of English letters
and the comma, space, and period. Basile has organized it all into hexagon-shaped rooms each with four walls of books containing five shelves with 32 volumes
of 410 pages each. Everything is arranged in a pseudo-random fashion, so
browsing the online library feels like a treasure hunt. Here's how it work- search
page is given a unique sequential page number in base 10, the text on each page
is encased inside this page numbers. An algorithm Basile created uses the page number
as a seed to generate a unique big number, that output is then converted into
base 29 so that it can be represented using every letter in the English
alphabet as well as the comma, space, and the period. Basile has made sure
that the algorithm will produce every possible combination and the same page
number will create the same output every time which means that what is on each
page is already predetermined so in a way every page already
exists! It only needs to be looked up. The really mind-blowing
thing is that the contents of a page can be converted to base 10 then sent through
the inverted algorithm and then can be turned into the exact page number they're
found on. It's a truly eerie experience because we can find the permanent
location for any 3200 character text. We can find in this library the
description of our birth, every possible description of our death, every poem,
every joke, every lie, anything that could be said can be found on this site. This
thing blurs the line between invention and discovery. Did we really discover or
invent that thing if its description already existed? About 10 to the power 4677 different
pages are offered by the library of babel in comparison there are only 10 to the power 80 atoms in the observable universe.
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| Jonathan Basile at a TEDx Event |
The Idea
Basile
was inspired to create this truly overarching library from Jorge Luis
Borges’ text “The Library of Babel” (“La Biblioteca de Babel”).
The text describes a version of a universal library, containing books with
every possible combination of 410 pages of letters, thus containing every book
that ever has been and every book that ever could be written, drowned out by an
immense quantity of nonsense. Jorge Luis Borges is one of the most influential
and innovative authors of the twentieth century. He is best known for his many
short stories, each of which creates a sort of ontological thought experiment
in a few brief pages. Borges was truly a great inspiration for Jonathan
Basile to create such an astonishing website.
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| Jorge Luis Borges in 1981 |
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| The first page of the handwritten manuscript of Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel (La Biblioteca de Babel). |
The Creation Of the Library
In the past underdeveloped era, such a library was nothing but fantasy,
however, Basile, while studying English literature at Columbia University,
saw that with modern technology using computers he could actually make Borges’s
vision into a reality. As such, Basile set out on the mission to create
the fiction into reality. Primarily, Basile had to remove the numbers in order
to make the task somewhat feasible. Consequently, he spent about six months
trying to create the library. But he had to face some trouble when
he discovered that it would still require more digital storage
than could fit in the entire universe. So, to make the task even more
manageable, Basile utilized books that are 410 pages long and contain 3,200
characters per page. Even with these limitations, he calculated that the
number of “books” would be somewhere around 10 to the power of two million. So
he had to settle for a library that exists as an algorithm. This program
runs whenever someone puts in the text at libraryofbabel.info. He also scaled
it back so no two books share a page, and the library still has 10 to the power
of 4,677 books.
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| High Circular Gallery, an illustration by Erik Desmazières for “The Library of Babel,” by Jorge Luis Borges |
Influences
The idea of this library put on by Borge already had a great influence on Basile. But it also had an influence on many other people. Many writers used this concept in there books and novels. The most notable influence was that on one of the great directors of the 21st century – Christopher Nolan. In Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar, the protagonist, Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, becomes trapped in a black hole which mirrors the Library of Babel; Cooper's universe consists of an infinitely extended tesseract consisting of the back-side of a specific bookshelf full of books in his former family home in all directions, but at different times in the bookshelf's history. This scene has been compared to the Library of Babel, and Nolan cites Borges as an artistic influence.
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| The 'tesseract' in the film Interstellar representing the backside of a bookshelf spread infinitely with a non-linear timeline from the past to the present. In this film, the tesseract is a grid-like structure where time has been represented as a physical dimension. |
If such a library could exist physically in reality it would be paradise to live for or as Jorge Luis Borges said “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
You can check the Library Of Babel website at https://libraryofbabel.info/
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