James Gleick Quotes & Sayings

Most people imagine the canonical dripping faucet as relentlessly periodic, but it is not necessarily so, as a moment of experimentation reveals. "It's a simple example of a system that goes from predictable behavior to unpredictable behavior, "Shaw said. "If you turn it up a little bit, you can see a regime where the pitter-patter is irregular. As it turns out, it's not a predictable pattern beyond a short time. So even something as simple as a faucet can generate a pattern that is eternally creative. — James Gleick

A book is not necessarily made of paper. A book is not necessarily made to be read on a Kindle. A book is a collection of text, organized in one of a variety of ways. You could say that words printed on paper and bound between cloth covers will someday be obsolete. But if and when that day comes, there will still be a thing called books. — James Gleick

The new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague - force, mass, motion, and even time - and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. — James Gleick

Memes can be visual. Our image of George Washington is a meme. We don't actually have any idea what George Washington looked like. There are so many different portraits of him, and they're all different. But we have an image in our head, and that image is propagated from one place to another, from one person to another. — James Gleick

Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person's mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated - created from connections that were not there before — James Gleick

The brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imagination. Some chaos exists out there, and the brain seems to have more flexibility than classical physics in finding the order in it. — James Gleick

IN THE MIND'S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity. — James Gleick

It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did. — James Gleick

The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing — James Gleick

The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract - a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists have finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence. — James Gleick

"Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science. — James Gleick

Humorists are using Twitter to tell jokes in an interesting way. It doesn't have to be profound, and it doesn't have to be earth-shaking, but it is transformative. — James Gleick

The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things. — James Gleick

Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience. — James Gleick

Incompleteness was real. It meant that mathematics could never be proved free of self-contradiction. — James Gleick

The lexis is a measure of shared experience, which comes from interconnectedness. The number of users of the language forms only the first part of the equation: jumping in four centuries from 5 million English speakers to a billion. — James Gleick

Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too. — James Gleick

We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation. — James Gleick

Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic. — James Gleick

Human computers had no future, he saw: — James Gleick

So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy. — James Gleick

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes. — James Gleick

You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it — James Gleick

From this point of view, the laws of science represent data compression in action. — James Gleick

He was going to kill Russell's dream of a perfect logical system. — James Gleick

Mandelbrot saw a seemingly smooth boundary resolve itself into a chain of spirals like the tails of sea horses. The irrational fertilized the rational. — James Gleick

Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality. — James Gleick

In spacetime, all events are baked together: a four-dimensional continuum. Past and future are no more privileged than left and right or up and down. — James Gleick

It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe. — James Gleick

Somehow the wondrous promise of the earth is that there are beautiful things in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them. He put the cigarette down. Smoke rose from the ashtray, first in a thin column then (with a nod to universality) in broken tendrils that swirled up to the ceiling. — James Gleick

One simple but powerful consequence of the fractal geometry of surfaces is that surfaces in contact do not touch everywhere. The bumpiness at all scales prevents that. Even in rock under enormous pressure, at some sufficiently small scale it becomes clear that gaps remain, allowing fluid to flow. — James Gleick

When the genetic code was solved, in the early 1960s, it turned out to be full of redundancy. Much of the mapping from nucleotides to amino acids seemed arbitrary - not as neatly patterned as any of Gamow's proposals. Some amino acids correspond to just one codon, others to two, four, or six. Particles called ribosomes ratchet along the RNA strand and translate it, three bases at a time. Some codons are redundant; some actually serve as start signals and stop signals. The redundancy serves exactly the purpose that an information theorist would expect. It provides tolerance for errors. Noise affects biological messages like any other. Errors in DNA - misprints - are mutations. — James Gleick

Gregor Mendel's years of research with green and yellow peas showed that such a thing must exist. Colors and other traits vary depending on many factors, such as temperature and soil content, but something is preserved whole; it does not blend or diffuse; it must be quantized. Mendel had discovered the gene, though he did not name it. For him it was more an algebraic convenience than a physical entity. — James Gleick

But unlike most physicists, Marcus eventually learned Lorenz's lesson, that a deterministic system can produce much more than just periodic behavior. He knew to look for wild disorder, and he knew that islands of structure could appear within the disorder. So he brought to the problem of the Great Red Spot an understanding that a complex system can give rise to turbulence and coherence at the same time. He could work within an emerging discipline that was creating its own tradition of using the computer as an experimental tool. And he was willing to think of himself as a new kind of scientist: not primarily an astronomer, not a fluid dynamicist, not an applied mathematician, but a specialist in chaos. — James Gleick

We will have learned to understand and express all of physics in the language of information. — James Gleick

I am a physicist, not a biologist. ... But I am very much excited by your article in May 30th Nature, and think that brings Biology over into the group of "exact" sciences. ... If your point of view is correct each organism will be characterized by a long number written in quadrucal (?) system with figures 1, 2, 3, 4 standing for different bases. ... This would open a very exciting possibility of theoretical research based on combinatorix and the theory of numbers! ... I have a feeling this can be done. What do you think? — James Gleick

Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing. — James Gleick

Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few. — James Gleick

Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity. — James Gleick

In the 1920s, a generation before the coming of solid-state electronics, one could look at the circuits and see how the electron stream flowed. Radios had valves, as though electricity were a fluid to be diverted by plumbing. With the click of the knob came a significant hiss and hum, just at the edge of audibility. — James Gleick

Astronomers had already found the fingerprints of chaos in violence on the sun's surface, gaps in the asteroid belt, and the distribution of galaxies. Levin and her colleagues have found them in the exit from the big bang and in black holes. They predict that light trapped by a black hole can enter unstable chaotic orbits and be reemited-making the black hole visible, if only briefly. Yes, chaos can light up black holes. "There are rational numbers to mine, fractal sets, and all kinds of truly beautiful consequences," she says. "So on the one hand, people are horrified, on the other they're mesmerized." She does chaos in curved space-time. Einstein would be proud. — James Gleick

Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom. — James Gleick

Given an approximate knowledge of a system's initial conditions and an understanding of natural law, one can calculate the approximate behavior of the system. — James Gleick

No one has even a definitive spelling for Cawdrey's name (Cowdrey, Cawdry). But then, no one agreed on the spelling of most names: they were spoken, seldom written. In fact, few had any concept of "spelling" - the idea that each word, when written, should take a particular predetermined form of letters. The word cony (rabbit) appeared variously as conny, conye, conie, connie, coni, cuny, cunny, and cunnie in a single 1591 pamphlet. — James Gleick

Scientifically, information is a choice - a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world - writing, painting, music, money. — James Gleick

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover. — James Gleick

We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist. — James Gleick

Like the first two revolutions, chaos cuts away at the tenets of Newton's physics. As one physicist put it: Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability. — James Gleick

Our memories, too, blend the immediate past with the anticipation of the soon to be, and a living amalgam of these - not some infinitesimal pointlike instant forever fleeing out of reach - is our now. — James Gleick

We have a habit of turning to scientists when we want factual answers and artists when we want entertainment, but where are the facts about the nature of the self? Neurologists peering at PET scans and fMRIs know they aren't seeing the soul in there. — James Gleick

For Wiener, entropy was a measure of disorder; for Shannon, of uncertainty. Fundamentally, as they were realizing, these were the same. — James Gleick

Like Ada Lovelace, Turing was a programmer, looking inward to the step-by-step logic of his own mind. He imagined himself as a computer. He distilled mental procedures into their smallest constituent parts, the atoms of information processing. — James Gleick

The resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly, bits. — James Gleick

Names are not the things they name. Classes are not coextensive with subclasses. — James Gleick

In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It's abundantly obvious that one doesn't know the world around us in detail — James Gleick

Bits in the ether. — James Gleick

The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and the other, in effect, ringing the set at a distance of infinity. — James Gleick

Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern. — James Gleick

When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph. — James Gleick

We get better search results and we see more appropriate advertising when we let Google know who we are. — James Gleick

By the time Carl was four, Feynman was actively lobbying against a first-grade science book proposed for California schools. It began with pictures of a mechanical wind-up dog, a real dog, and a motorcycle, and for each the same question: "What makes it move?" The proposed answer - "Energy makes it move" - enraged him. That — James Gleick

Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we're about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of course, but it also changed the world. — James Gleick

In 1962 the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh, warned his colleagues that human existence was undergoing a "Great Mutation" - so sudden and so radical "that we are now suffering something like historical amnesia." He lamented the decline of reading; the distancing from nature (which he blamed in part on "ugly yellow Kodak boxes" and "the transistor radio everywhere"); and the loss of shared culture. — James Gleick

He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially. ... In him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him. ... He is always and everywhere. ... He is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting.5 — James Gleick

I really don't think of myself as a science writer. — James Gleick

One of the ways the telegraph changed us as humans was it gave us a new sense of what time it is. It gave us an understanding of simultaneity. It gave us the ability to synchronize clocks from one place to another. It made it possible for the world to have standard time and time zones and then Daylight Savings Time and then after that jetlag. All of that is due to the telegraph because, before that, the time was whatever it was wherever you were. — James Gleick

Nature forms patterns. Some are orderly in space but disorderly in time, others orderly in time but disorderly in space. Some patterns are fractal, exhibiting structures self-similar in scale. Others give rise to steady states or oscillating ones. Pattern formation has become a branch of physics and of materials science, allowing scientists to model the aggregation of particles into clusters, the fractured spread of electrical discharges, and the growth of crystals in ice and metal alloys. The dynamics seem so basic - shapes changing in space and time - yet only now are the tools available to understand them. — James Gleick

They could see from the start that Wilson's idea sat somewhere near the border between possible and hopeless - but on which side of the border? — James Gleick

In The Pickwick Papers, a man is said to have read up in the Britannica on Chinese metaphysics. There was, however, no such article: He read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information. — James Gleick

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases. He found a stock of twelve thousand E's, nine thousand T's, and only two hundred Z's. He and Morse rearranged the alphabet accordingly. They had originally used dash-dash-dot to represent T, the second most common letter; now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come. Long afterward, information theorists calculated that they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text. — James Gleick

Margaret Atwood writes: "As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere." Nearing death, John Updike reflects on A life poured into words - apparent waste intended to preserve the thing consumed. — James Gleick

Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its rules and habits are emerging in the open light, rather shall behind the closed doors of security agencies or corporate operations centers. — James Gleick

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing. — James Gleick

The leap from maps to fluid flow seemed so great that even those most responsible sometimes felt it was like a dream. How nature could tie such complexity to such simplicity was far from obvious. "You have to regard it as a kind of miracle, not like the usual connection between theory and experiment," Jerry Gollub said. Within a few years, the miracle was being repeated again and again in a vast bestiary of laboratory systems: bigger fluid cells with water and mercury, electronic oscillators, lasers, even chemical reactions. Theorists adapted Feigenbaum's techiniques and found other mathematical routes to chaos, cousins of period-doubling: such patterns as intermittency and quasiperiodicity. These, too, proved universal in theory and experiment. — James Gleick

Information is crucial to our biological substance - our genetic code is information. But before 1950, it was not obvious that inheritance had anything to do with code. And it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our nerves carry messages, just like wires. — James Gleick

Winfree came from a family in which no one had gone to college. He got started, he would say, by not having proper education. His father, rising from the bottom of the life insurance business to the level of vice president, moved family almost yearly up and down the East Coast, and Winfree attended than a dozen schools before finishing high school. He developed a feeling that the interesting things in the world had to do with biology and mathematics and a companion feeling that no standard combination of the two subjects did justice to what was interesting. So he decided not to take a standard approach. He took a five-year course in engineering physics at Cornell University, learning applied mathematics and a full range of hands-on laboratory styles. Prepared to be hired into military-industrial complex, he got a doctorate in biology, striving to combine experiment with theory in new ways. — James Gleick

Monod proposed an analogy: Just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an "abstract kingdom" rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas. Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. Ideas have "spreading power," he noted - "infectivity, as it were" - and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are "just as real" as the neurons they inhabit. Ideas have power, he said. — James Gleick

I have seen the future, and it is still in the future. — James Gleick

In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort. — James Gleick

Douady and Hubbard used a brilliant chain of new mathematics to prove that every floating molecule does indeed hang on a filigree that binds it to all the rest, a delicate web springing from tiny outcroppings on the main set, a "devil's polymer," in Mandelbrot's phrase. The mathematicians proved that any segment-no matter where, and no matter how small-would, when blown up by the computer microscope, reveal new molecules, each resembling the main set and yet not quite the same. Every new molecule would be surrounded by its own spirals and flame-like projections, and those, inevitably, would reveal molecules tinier still, always similar, never identical, fulfilling some mandate of infinite variety, a miracle of miniaturization in which every new detail was sure to be a universe of its own, diverse and entire. — James Gleick

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. — James Gleick

Shannon used a phrase he had never used before: information theory. — James Gleick

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next? - RICHARD P. FEYNMAN — James Gleick

It's important with any new technology to try to pay conscious attention to what the drawbacks might be. We choose to multitask. Sometimes our choices aren't the wisest of choices, and we regret them, but they are our choices. I think it'd be wrong to think that they're automatically bad. — James Gleick

He was going to show that the paradoxes were not excrescences; they were fundamental. — James Gleick

The Selfish Gene - he set off decades of debate by declaring: We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. — James Gleick

Flying was great. You have to think fast. You have to develop intuition about the physics of air moving quickly over a surface. — James Gleick

Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia. — James Gleick

The Difference Engine stands - for a replica works today, in the Science Museum in London - as a milestone of what could be achieved in precision engineering. In the composition of its alloys, the exactness of its dimensions, the interchangeability of its parts, nothing surpassed this segment of an unfinished machine. Still, it was a curio. And it was as far as Babbage could go. — James Gleick

It may be that all the laws of energy, and all the properties of matter, and all the chemistry of all the colloids are as powerless to explain the body as they are impotent to comprehend the soul. For my part, I think not. D'Arcy Thompson — James Gleick

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong. The — James Gleick

Lorenz saw it differently. Yes, you could change the weather. You could make it do something different from what it would otherwise have done. But if you did, then you would never know what it would otherwise have done. It would be like giving an extra shuffle to an already well-shuffled pack of cards. You know it will change your luck, but you don't know whether for better or worse. — James Gleick

Science was constructed against a lot of nonsense, — James Gleick

Thinking generates entropy.") — James Gleick

a confused heap of mingle-mangle"). — James Gleick

Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy: — James Gleick

Nanosecond precision matters for worldwide communications systems. It matters for navigation by Global Positioning System satellite signals: an error of a billionth of a second means an error of just about a foot, the distance light travels in that time. — James Gleick

They had a game they would play, sitting at a coffeehouse. They would ask: How far away is the nearest strange attractor? Was it that rattling automobile fender? That flag snapping erratically in a steady breeze? A fluttering leaf? "You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it," Shaw said, echoing Thomas S. Kuhn. — James Gleick

Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment ... The gene has its cultural analog, too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator - an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day, a meme is a virus. — James Gleick

Believers in chaos-and they sometimes call themselves believers, or converts, or evangelists-speculate about determinism and free will, about evolution, about the nature of conscious intelligence. They feel that they are turning back a trend in science toward reductionism, the analysis of systems in terms of their constituent parts: quarks, chromosomes, or neurons. They believe that they are looking for the whole. — James Gleick