This essay pursues the history of knowledge in the form of what Francis Bacon called a “literary history”—a “story of learning” that tracks “the antiquities and originals of knowledges.” It focuses on the changing interrelations of information and knowledge from the seventeenth century to the present day in order to identify a fundamental continuity in a knowledge project that links the Enlightenment to our own era of quantum computation. At the core of that project has been Bacon's and Robert Boyle's dreams of re‐making the world through a “handshake” between the intellectual and physical worlds. Quantum theory tells us that the lingua franca that realizes that handshake is information. I track that realization from the simultaneous emergence of newspapers and modern science 350 years ago to today's moment of fake news and quantum computation. In doing so, I identify a feature of the history of knowledge that is applicable to other ventures into that history: a taxonomy of “delays” in explanatory knowledge caused by mismatches between concepts and technologies.

中文翻译：

---

启蒙，信息和哥白尼时代的延缓：知识史的一个缩影

本文以弗朗西斯·培根（Francis Bacon）所谓的“文学史”的形式来追寻知识的历史，这是一种“学习的故事”，它追踪“知识的古董和原著”。它着眼于从17世纪到今天不断变化的信息和知识的相互关系，以便确定将启蒙运动与我们自己的量子计算时代联系在一起的知识项目的基本连续性。该项目的核心是培根和罗伯特·博伊尔（Robert Boyle）的梦想，即通过知识世界和物理世界之间的“握手”来重塑世界。量子理论告诉我们，认识到握手的通用语言是信息。我追踪从350年前报纸和现代科学的同时兴起到今天的实现过程。虚假新闻和量子计算的时刻。通过这样做，我确定了知识历史的一个特征，该特征可应用于该历史中的其他企业：由于概念和技术之间的不匹配而导致的解释性知识的“延迟”分类法。