It is thought that only a week's worth of The Times contains more information that a knowable in a lifetime in the 18th C. The amount of technical information is doubling every two years years. And yet information for its own sake is useless. Nor is quantity synonymous with quality. After all, it's not as if the Times produces something akin to Voltaire's 'Candide' or Gray's 'Elegy in a Country Church Yard' every week. Moreover, concepts only arise from how information is looked at. Perception is all. Counting the number of blades of grass does not give the concept of a football pitch. It takes a lateral jump to make it so.