James Gleick quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by James Gleick

James Gleick Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from James Gleick on Wise Famous Quotes.

Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.

Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.

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

Patents have long served as a fundamental cog in the American machine, cherished in our national soul.

Thinking generates entropy.")

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

Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.

Matter is a holograph of itself in its own internal radiation. Forces

What we call the past is built on bits. - John Archibald Wheeler

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

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

a confused heap of mingle-mangle").

Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.

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

Cyberspace as a mode of being will never go away. We live in cyberspace.

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

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

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

But information is physical.

To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

The universe computes its own destiny.

Hugo Gernsback invented pulp magazines and the grandfather paradox. Not bad for a charlatan.

The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.

The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.

A bit, fundamentally, is always a coin toss.

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

Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.

Measured in bits or their drolly named quantum counterpart, qubits.

Science was constructed against a lot of nonsense,

I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.

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

Information can be considered as order wrenched from disorder.

For him knowledge did not describe; it acted and accomplished.

The universe is computing its own destiny.

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

The telegraphic style banishes all the forms of politeness,

Typical human lungs pack in a surface bigger than a tennis court.

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.

At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.

Grand - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" - and

We choose mania over boredom every time.

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.

It is fitting that history attached Morse's name to his code, more than to his device.

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

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

During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists' understanding of mutations in DNA.

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

I'll cheerfully confess to spending a lot of time playing completely disgusting computer games that have no redeeming social value.

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

Nullius in verba was the Royal Society's motto. Don't take anyone's word for it.

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

Running for president is the new selfie.

Riches have never made people great but love does it every day - we

Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.

(When McLuhan announced that the medium was the message, he was being arch. The medium is both opposite to, and entwined with, the message.)

If instantaneity is what we want, television cannot compete with cyberspace.

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

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

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?

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

Nature was constrained. Disorder was channeled, it seemed, into patterns with some common underlying theme.

Human computers had no future, he saw:

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

Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy. - David L. Watson

Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.

In cyberspace, the Wikipedians never stop gathering: It's a continuous round-the-clock rolling workfest.

Genes themselves are made of bits.

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.

The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The

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

First law: The energy of the universe is constant. Second law: The entropy of the universe always increases.

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

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

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

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

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

I take the view that we all have permission to be a little baffled by quantum information science and algorithmic information theory.

The Internet is like a town that leaves its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don't already know don't belong

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

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

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

So in 1910 a Danish botanist, Wilhelm Johannsen, self-consciously invented the word gene.

Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.

Bits in the ether.

What English speakers call "computer science" Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik

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

Information is entropy. This was the strangest and most powerful notion of all.

The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.

Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy:

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

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

information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself.

I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. - Richard Feynman

When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean?

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

Chaos is a creator of information - another apparent paradox.

You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment ...