James Gleick Quotes

#1. 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

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

James Gleick

#3. Pattern, as he saw it, equals redundancy. In ordinary language, redundancy serves as an aid to understanding. In cryptanalysis, that same redundancy is the Achilles' heel.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#5. In general, I think people should be skeptical of the Internet as a reference tool because so much of what's on it is unreliable and costumed - a hall of mirrors.

James Gleick

#6. For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#9. (The code became known as the dot-and-dash alphabet, but the unmentioned space remained just as important; Morse code was not a binary language.*) That

James Gleick

#10. 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

#11. Children and scientists share an outlook on life. 'If I do this, what will happen?' is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#14. a confused heap of mingle-mangle").

James Gleick

#15. 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

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

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#20. As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldn't necessarily be good.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#23. A bit, the smallest unit of information, the fundamental particle of information theory, is a choice, yes or no, on or off. It's a choice that you can embody in electrical circuits, and it is thanks to that that we have all this ubiquitous computing.

James Gleick

#24. The telegraphic style banishes all the forms of politeness,

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#26. Bits in the ether.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. Type 'What is th' and faster than you can find the 'e' Google is sending choices back at you: 'What is the cloud?' 'What is the mean?' 'What is the American dream?' 'What is the illuminati?' Google is trying to read your mind. Only it's not your mind. It's the World Brain.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#32. For the modern physicist, reality is the whole thing, past and future joined in a single history. The sensation of now is just that, a sensation, and different for everyone. Instead of one master clock, we have clocks in multitudes.

James Gleick

#33. Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#35. The word 'code' turns out to be a really important word for my book, 'The Information.' The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code.

James Gleick

#36. Science was constructed against a lot of nonsense,

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. Chaos is a creator of information - another apparent paradox.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#42. God plays dice with the universe," is Ford's answer to Einstein's famous question. "But they're loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends.

James Gleick

#43. Human computers had no future, he saw:

James Gleick

#44. Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times.

James Gleick

#45. But information is physical.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#49. "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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There's a delicate balance.

James Gleick

#53. 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

#54. Patent battles have become a strong catalyst for mergers, reducing competition in various domains. The largest corporations, with gigantic patent portfolios, routinely enter into cross-licensing agreements with their largest competitors.

James Gleick

#55. 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

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

James Gleick

#57. 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

#58. People worry about Twitter. Twitter is banal. It's 140-character messages. By definition, you can hardly say anything profound. On the other hand, we communicate. And, sometimes, we communicate about things that are important.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#60. 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

#61. With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow. Ants deploy their pheromones, trails of chemical information; Theseus unwound Ariadne's thread. Now people leave paper trails.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#63. This was the first time anyone suggested the genome was an information store measurable in bits. Shannon's guess was conservative, by at least four orders of magnitude.

James Gleick

#64. Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.

James Gleick

#65. If we want to live freely and privately in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century - and surely we do - perhaps above all we need a revival of the small-town civility of the nineteenth century. Manners, not devices: sometimes it's just better not to ask, and better not to look.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#67. The subject is increased by the fact that while we have to deal with novel and strange facts, we have also to use old words in novel and inconsistent senses.

James Gleick

#68. 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

#69. It struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can't say what it's going to do next.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#71. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level - an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.

James Gleick

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. Turing exclaiming once, "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mundane brain, something like the president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company.

James Gleick

#75. 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.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#78. For a brief time in the 1850s, the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) preserve every message that passed through their wires. Millions of telegrams - in fireproof safes. Imagine the possibilities for history!

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#80. China's official State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television issued a warning and denunciation of time travel in 2011, concerned that such stories interfere with history - "casually

James Gleick

#81. To continue down the path of comprehensiveness, Wikipedia will need to sustain the astonishing mass fervor of its birth years. Will that be possible? No one knows.

James Gleick

#82. The pattern appears so ethereally, that it is hard to remember that the shape is an attractor. It is not just any trajectory of a dynamical system. It is the trajectory toward which all other trajectories converge.

James Gleick

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. Granted, I'm more interested in technology than most people, and less interested in politics than most. But I don't like to think about categories. I really see myself as a general non-fiction writer.

James Gleick

#86. The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own ... It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism.

James Gleick

#87. Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,' has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.

James Gleick

#88. The Fifties and Sixties were years of unreal optimism about weather forecasting. Newspapers and magazines were filled with hope for weather science, not just for prediction but for modification and control. Two technologies were maturing together: the digital computer and the space satellite.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

#91. Information is closely associated with uncertainty. Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information.

James Gleick

#92. Rudolf Clausius coined the word in 1865, in the course of creating a science of thermodynamics. He needed to name a certain quantity that he had discovered - a quantity related to energy, but not energy.

James Gleick

#93. Grand - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" - and

James Gleick

#94. 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

James Gleick

#95. Because everyone in the world has the power to edit, Wikipedia has long been plagued by the so-called edit war. This is like a house where the husband wants it warm and the wife wants it cool and they sneak back and forth adjusting the thermostat at cross purposes.

James Gleick

#96. Thinking generates entropy.")

James Gleick

#97. 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

#98. Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy:

James Gleick

#99. Feynman resented the polished myths of most scientific history, submerging the false steps and halting uncertainties under a surface of orderly intellectual progress, but he created a myth of his own.

James Gleick

#100. 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