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Author: James Gleick
Quotes of Author: James Gleick
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  1. James Gleick _ Genius: The Life and Science

    The adult Feynman asked: If all scientific knowledge were lost in a cataclysm, what single statement would preserve the most information for the next generations of creatures?
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  2. James Gleick _ Chaos: Making a New Science

    Here was one coin with two sides. Here was order, with randomness emerging, and then one step further away was randomness with its own underlying order.
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  3. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    1. You can't win; 2. You can't break even either." But this is the cosmic, fateful one. The universe is running down. It is a degenerative one-way street. The final state of maximum entropy is our destiny.
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  4. James Gleick _ Chaos: Making a New Science

    The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.
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  5. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    First law: The energy of the universe is constant. Second law: The entropy of the universe always increases.
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  6. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    A "file" was originally-in sixteenth-century England-a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes.
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  7. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet {alfabet, alfabeto, }. The alphabet was invented only once.
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  8. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    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.
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  9. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    One unlikely Luddite was also one of the first long-term beneficiaries. Plato {channeling the nonwriter Socrates} warned that this technology meant impoverishment: For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.
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  10. James Gleick _ Chaos: Making a New Science

    Even when a damped, driven system is at equilibrium, it is not at equilibrium,
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  11. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    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.
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  12. James Gleick _ Chaos: Making a New Science

    mandelbrot changed the way ibm's engineers thought about the cause of noise. bursts of errors had always sent the engineers looking for a man sticking a screwdriver somewhere.
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