Simon Singh Quotes

#1. The first microdot to be spotted by the FBI was in 1941, following a tip-off that the Americans should look for a tiny gleam from the surface of a letter, indicative of smooth film.

Simon Singh

#2. All that was required to measure the planet was a man with a stick and a brain. In other words, couple an intellect with some experimental apparatus and almost anything seems achievable.

Simon Singh

#3. The NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world.

Simon Singh

#4. first ever military cryptographic device, the Spartan scytale, dating back to the fifth century B.C. The scytale is a wooden staff around which a strip of leather or parchment is wound,

Simon Singh

#5. Zimmermann employed a neat trick that used asymmetric RSA encryption in tandem with old-fashioned symmetric encryption.

Simon Singh

#6. Each distinct cipher can be considered in terms of a general encrypting method, known as the algorithm, and a key, which specifies the exact details of a particular encryption.

Simon Singh

#7. Zimmermann believed that everybody deserved the right to the privacy that was offered by RSA encryption, and he directed his political zeal toward developing an RSA encryption product for the masses.

Simon Singh

#8. Because a quantum computer deals with 1's and 0's that are in a quantum superposition, they are called quantum bits, or qubits (pronounced "cubits"). The advantage of qubits becomes even clearer when we consider more particles.

Simon Singh

#9. baseball is a game played by the dexterous, but only understood by the Poindexterous."9

Simon Singh

#10. The letters a and l are the most common in Arabic, partly because of the definite article al-, whereas the letter j appears only a tenth as frequently.

Simon Singh

#11. We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe; that's a good estimate with well-defined error bars and with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you.

Simon Singh

#12. The correct use of a strong cipher is a clear boon to sender and receiver, but the misuse of a weak cipher can generate a very false sense of security.

Simon Singh

#13. The security of a cryptosystem must not depend on keeping secret the crypto-algorithm. The security depends only on keeping secret the key.

Simon Singh

#14. What is the least number of weights that can be used on a set of scales to weigh any whole number of kilograms from 1 to 40?

Simon Singh

#15. diagonally polarized photons are in a quantum quandary when confronted by a vertical Polaroid filter.

Simon Singh

#16. I recall thinking that this paper would be the least interesting paper that I will ever be on." Adleman could not have been more wrong. The system, dubbed RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman) as opposed to ARS, went on to become the most influential cipher in modern cryptography.

Simon Singh

#17. Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste.

Simon Singh

#18. One of the features of the Enigma machine was its inability to encipher a letter as itself, which was a consequence of the reflector. The letter a could never be enciphered as A, the letter b could never be enciphered as B, and so on.

Simon Singh

#19. Euclid discovered that perfect numbers are always the multiple of two numbers, one of which is a power of 2 and the other being the next power of 2 minus 1.

Simon Singh

#20. 250 qubits, it is possible to represent roughly 1075 combinations, which is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. If it were possible to achieve the appropriate superposition with 250 particles, then a quantum computer could perform 1075 simultaneous computations,

Simon Singh

#21. the enemy of security: repetition leads to patterns, and cryptanalysts thrive on patterns.

Simon Singh

#22. In June 1991 he took the drastic step of asking a friend to post PGP on a Usenet bulletin board. PGP is just a piece of software, and so from the bulletin board it could be downloaded by anyone for free. PGP was now loose on the Internet.

Simon Singh

#23. [Martin Hellman:] Unless you're foolish enough to be continually excited, you won't have the motivation, you won't have the energy to carry it through.

Simon Singh

#24. Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists, a mystical tribe attempting to conjure sensible words out of meaningless symbols.

Simon Singh

#25. Pliny the Elder explained how the "milk" of the tithymalus plant could be used as an invisible ink. Although the ink is transparent after drying, gentle heating chars it and turns it brown. Many organic fluids behave in a similar way, because they are rich in carbon and therefore char easily.

Simon Singh

#26. if N is large enough, it is virtually impossible to deduce p and q from N, and this is perhaps the most beautiful and elegant aspect of the RSA asymmetric cipher.

Simon Singh

#27. The best random keys are created by harnessing natural physical processes, such as radioactivity, which is known to exhibit truly random behavior. The

Simon Singh

#28. the hotline between the presidents of Russia and America is secured via a onetime pad cipher.

Simon Singh

#29. We would be in real trouble if everybody in GCHQ was like him, but we can tolerate a higher proportion of such people than most organizations. We put up with a number of people like him. Figure 66 James Ellis. (photo credit 6.4) One of Ellis's greatest qualities was his breadth of knowledge.

Simon Singh

#30. copies were passed to the cryptanalysts, who sat in little kiosks, ready to tease out the meanings of the messages. As well as supplying the emperors of Austria with invaluable intelligence, the Viennese Black Chamber sold the information it harvested to other powers in Europe. In 1774 an

Simon Singh

#31. Turing knew of Babbage's work, and the universal Turing machine can be seen as a reincarnation of Difference Engine No. 2. In fact, Turing had gone much further, and provided computing with a solid theoretical basis,

Simon Singh