One if by land minus two if by sea, over the square-root of two

Happy National Poetry Month! The United States salutes word and whimsy in April, and Quantum Frontiers is continuing its tradition of celebrating. As a resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts and as a quantum information scientist, I have trouble avoiding the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.”&

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem, as well as others in the American canon, during the 1800s. Longfellow taught at Harvard in Cambridge, and he lived a few blocks away from the university, in what’s now a national historic site. Across the street from the house, a bust of the poet gazes downward, as though lost in thought, in Longfellow Park. Longfellow wrote one of his most famous poems about an event staged a short drive from—and, arguably, partially in—Cambridge.

The event took place “on the eighteenth of April, in [Seventeen] Seventy-Five,” as related by the narrator of “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Revere was a Boston silversmith and a supporter of the American colonies’ independence from Britain. Revolutionaries anticipated that British troops would set out from Boston sometime during the spring. The British planned to seize revolutionaries’ weapons in the nearby town of Concord and to jail revolutionary leaders in Lexington. The troops departed Boston during the night of April 18th.&

Upon learning of their movements, sexton Robert Newman sent a signal from Boston’s old North Church to Charlestown. Revere and the physician William Dawes rode out from Charlestown to warn the people of Lexington and the surrounding areas. A line of artificial hoof prints, pressed into a sidewalk a few minutes from the Longfellow house, marks part of Dawes’s trail through Cambridge. The initial riders galvanized more riders, who stirred up colonial militias that resisted the troops’ advance. The Battles of Lexington and Concord ensued, initiating the Revolutionary War.

Longfellow took liberties with the facts he purported to relate. But “Paul Revere’s Ride” has blown the dust off history books for generations of schoolchildren. The reader shares Revere’s nervous excitement as he fidgets, awaiting Newman’s signal:&

Now he patted his horse’s side,& 
Now gazed on the landscape far and near,& 
Then impetuous stamped the earth,& 
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search& 
The belfry-tower of the old North Church.

The moment the signal arrives, that excitement bursts its seams, and Revere leaps astride his horse. The reader comes to gallop through with the silversmith the night, the poem’s clip-clop-clip-clop rhythm evoking a horse’s hooves on cobblestones.

Not only does “Paul Revere’s Ride” revitalize history, but it also offers a lesson in information theory. While laying plans, Revere instructs Newman:&

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal light.

Then comes one of the poem’s most famous lines: “One if by land, and two if by sea.” The British could have left Boston by foot or by boat, and Newman had to communicate which. Specifying one of two options, he related one bit, or one basic unit of information. Newman thereby exemplifies a cornerstone of information theory: the encoding of a bit of information—an abstraction—in a physical system that can be in one of two possible states—a light that shines from one or two lanterns.

Benjamin Schumacher and Michael Westmoreland point out the information-theoretic interpretation of Newman’s action in their quantum-information textbook. I used their textbook in my first quantum-information course, as a senior in college. Before reading the book, I’d never felt that I could explain what information is or how it can be quantified. Information is an abstraction and a Big Idea, like consciousness, life, and piety. But, Schumacher and Westmoreland demonstrated, most readers already grasp the basics of information theory; some readers even studied the basics while memorizing a poem in elementary school. So I doff my hat—or, since we’re discussing the 1700s, my mobcap—to the authors.

Reading poetry enriches us more than we realize. So read a poem this April. You can find Longfellow’s poem here or ride off wherever your fancy takes you. &