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7bdd973
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When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
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James Gleick |
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9e406b4
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Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.
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science
life
philosophy
paradigm-shift
thomas-kuhn
chaos-theory
paradigm
mathematics
physics
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James Gleick |
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3e106f4
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It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.
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James Gleick |
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9dc2f56
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You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it
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geometry
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James Gleick |
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9960839
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Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.
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James Gleick |
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15685fb
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Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.
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James Gleick |
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c4de7ad
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Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
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science
randomness
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James Gleick |
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b69907a
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We all behave like Maxwell's demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we..
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maxwell
entropy
information
organization
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James Gleick |
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3fec8ab
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Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.
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James Gleick |
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a5e8bf2
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The universe is computing its own destiny.
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James Gleick |
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b9768fa
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Maybe that's why young people make success. They don't know enough. Because when you know enough it's obvious that every idea that you have is no good.
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James Gleick |
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f4fc315
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When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullive..
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James Gleick |
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704348e
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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.
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James Gleick |
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ec59929
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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.
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James Gleick |
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9c6fc0e
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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, a..
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James Gleick |
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7bc9128
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Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.
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information
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James Gleick |
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535a5a8
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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.
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James Gleick |
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dbaedf5
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Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.
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geometry
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James Gleick |
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e30e855
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For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until 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. For..
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linguistic-drift
scientific-revolution
jargon
information
isaac-newton
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James Gleick |
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27af146
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Redundancy--inefficient by definition--serves as the antidote to confusion.
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James Gleick |
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4931053
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Science was constructed against a lot of nonsense,
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James Gleick |
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a589c63
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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.
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James Gleick |
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0d223ec
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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
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geometry
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James Gleick |
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64dea35
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Somehow, after all, as the universe ebbs toward its final equilibrium in the featureless heat bath of maximum entropy, it manages to create interesting structures.
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James Gleick |
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a20faa7
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There is no getting into the future except by waiting.
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James Gleick |
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ec54545
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But unpredictability was not the reason physicists and mathematicians began taking pendulums seriously again in the sixties and seventies. Unpredictability was only the attention-grabber. Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but..
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James Gleick |
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d971fbd
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The spot is a self-organizing system, created and regulated by the same nonlinear twists that create the unpredictable turmoil around it. It is stable chaos.
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James Gleick |
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f36f432
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Memes can replicate with impressive virulence while leaving swaths of collateral damage--patent medicines and psychic surgery, astrology and satanism, racist myths, superstitions, and (a special case) computer viruses. In a way, these are the most interesting--the memes that thrive to their hosts' detriment, such as the idea that suicide bombers will find their reward in heaven.
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James Gleick |
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fdd9b1d
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The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave. Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor approach. Textbooks showed students only the rare non-linear systems that would give way to such techniques. They did not display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Nonlinear systems with real chaos were rarely taught and rarely learned..
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James Gleick |
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705631d
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It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.
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James Gleick |
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ef0fe1f
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The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.
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James Gleick |
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a5b47a1
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Nullius in verba was the Royal Society's motto. Don't take anyone's word for it.
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James Gleick |
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38a32aa
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Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.
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geometry
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James Gleick |
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57eb267
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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.
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geometry
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James Gleick |
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9c96cc0
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Where, then, is any particular gene--say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven's Piano Sonata in E minor. Is it in the original handwritten score? The printed sheet music? Any one performance--or perhaps the sum of all performances, historical and potential, real and imagined? The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the ..
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James Gleick |
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8e92c9f
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The macromolecules of organic life embody information in an intricate structure. A single hemoglobin molecule comprises four chains of polypeptides, two with 141 amino acids and two with 146, in strict linear sequence, bonded and folded together. Atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and iron could mingle randomly for the lifetime of the universe and be no more likely to form hemoglobin than the proverbial chimpanzees to type the works of Shak..
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James Gleick |
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3083cf8
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Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing--syllogisms can be spoken as well as written--but it did not. Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis. Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently. 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. Lo..
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James Gleick |
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0f49cea
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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.
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geometry
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James Gleick |
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e695a6e
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He worked for two months without pause. His functional day was twenty-two hours. He would try to go to sleep in a kind of buzz, and awaken two hours later with his thoughts exactly where he had left them. His diet was strictly coffee. (Even when healthy and at peace, Feigenbaum subsisted exclusively on the reddest possible meat, coffee, and red wine. His friends speculated that he must be getting his vitamins from cigarettes.) In the end, a..
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James Gleick |
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0c5413d
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Another way to speak of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn, does not guarantee enlightenment or wisdom. ( said that, too: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?") It is an ancient observation, but one that seemed to bear restating when information became plent..
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James Gleick |
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2042b1b
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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.
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James Gleick |
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d3f62f7
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riches have never made people great but love does it every day--we
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James Gleick |
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53ada93
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It had been well known for twenty years that the distribution of large and small earthquakes followed a particular mathematical pattern, precisely the same scaling pattern that seemed to govern the distribution of personal incomes in a free-market economy.
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James Gleick |
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4336edc
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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 impor..
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James Gleick |