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cd3b592
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In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases. He found a stock of t..
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James Gleick |
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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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James Gleick |
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15bbfcd
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Like the first two revolutions, chaos cuts away at the tenets of Newton's physics. As one physicist put it: "Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability."
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James Gleick |
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ad963f6
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We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to the heat death of equilibrium and sameness.... This heat death in physics has a counterpart in the ethics of Kierkegaard, who pointed out that we live in a chaotic moral universe. In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system.... Like the Red Queen, we cannot stay where we are without running as fast..
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James Gleick |
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441f172
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When McLuhan announced that the medium was the message, he was being arch. The medium is both opposite to, and entwined with, the message.)
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James Gleick |
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09891fe
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When Isaac Newton embarked on his great program, he encountered a fundamental lack of definition where it was most needed. He began with a semantic sleight of hand: "I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all," he wrote deceptively. Defining these words was his very purpose. There were no agreed standards for weights and measures. Weight and measure were themselves vague terms. Latin seemed more reliable than..
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James Gleick |
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cceb14f
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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"
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James Gleick |
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1b0b23f
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Winfree came from a family in which no one had gone to college. He got started, he would say, by not having proper education. His father, rising from the bottom of the life insurance business to the level of vice president, moved family almost yearly up and down the East Coast, and Winfree attended than a dozen schools before finishing high school. He developed a feeling that the interesting things in the world had to do with biology and ma..
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James Gleick |
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9ffb63e
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IN THE MIND'S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
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geometry
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James Gleick |
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7af9a91
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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."
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James Gleick |
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5347dd8
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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.
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James Gleick |
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ef6149c
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Other people, too, worried about this new gap between the speeds of travel and messaging. An important London banker told Babbage he disapproved: "It will enable our clerks to plunder us, and then be off to Liverpool on their way to America at the rate of twenty miles an hour." Babbage could only express the hope that science might yet find a remedy for the problem it had created."
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James Gleick |
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57edd04
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He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially.... In him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him.... He is always and everywhere.... He is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting.5
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James Gleick |
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12237cc
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Your body moves always in the present, the dividing line between the past and the future, but your mind is more free. It can think and is in the present. It can remember and at once is in the past. It can imagine and at once is in the future, in its own choice of all the possible futures. Your mind can travel through time.
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James Gleick |
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e282201
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God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies which we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be showne....
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James Gleick |
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0a77c09
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The Difference Engine stands--for a replica works today, in the Science Museum in London--as a milestone of what could be achieved in precision engineering. In the composition of its alloys, the exactness of its dimensions, the interchangeability of its parts, nothing surpassed this segment of an unfinished machine. Still, it was a curio. And it was as far as Babbage could go.
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James Gleick |
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34680d7
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Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.
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James Gleick |
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da6b88f
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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"
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James Gleick |
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8765945
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Lorenz saw it differently. Yes, you could change the weather. You could make it do something different from what it would otherwise have done. But if you did, then you would never know what it would otherwise have done. It would be like giving an extra shuffle to an already well-shuffled pack of cards. You know it will change your luck, but you don't know whether for better or worse.
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James Gleick |
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0a08ee4
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In Isaac Newton's lifetime, no more than a few thousand people had any idea what he looked like, though he was one of England's most famous men, yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea--based on replicas of copies of rather poorly painted portraits. Even more pervasive and indelible are the smile of Mona Lisa, The Scream of Edvard Munch, and the silhouettes of various fictional extraterrestrials. These are memes, living a life of..
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James Gleick |
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27dd250
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During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists' understanding of mutations in DNA.
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James Gleick |
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7e2887a
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There is a progression from pictographic, writing the picture; to ideographic, writing the idea; and then logographic, writing the word. Chinese script began this transition between 4,500 and 8,000 years ago: signs that began as pictures came to represent meaningful units of sound. Because the basic unit was the word, thousands of distinct symbols were required. This is efficient in one way, inefficient in another. Chinese unifies an array ..
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James Gleick |
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e4f13ce
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For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them")."
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James Gleick |
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db60a6c
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Margaret Atwood writes: "As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere." Nearing death, John Updike reflects on A life poured into words--apparent waste intended to preserve the thing consumed."
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James Gleick |
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6825690
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Thomas Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, resisted his era's new-media hype: "The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter." Up to a point, he was right. 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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bf5a0b1
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By the time Carl was four, was actively lobbying against a first-grade science book proposed for California schools. It began with pictures of a mechanical wind-up dog, a real dog, and a motorcycle, and for each the same question: "What makes it move?" The proposed answer--"Energy makes it move"--enraged him."
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James Gleick |
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1e6a91d
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By any objective measure, the modern business of "psychopharmacology"--the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia itself--has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if any, are cured. The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one knows."
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James Gleick |
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fe0cc19
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The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins, As things emerged and moved and were dissolved, Either in distance, change or nothingness, The visible transformations of summer night, An argentine abstraction approaching form And suddenly denying itself away."
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James Gleick |
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941ad00
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What English speakers call "computer science" Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik"
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James Gleick |
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bf9845c
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The ceaseless motion and incomprehensible bustle of life. Feigenbaum recalled the words of Gustav Mahler, describing a sensation that he tried to capture in the third movement of his Second Symphony. Like the motions of dancing figures in a brilliantly lit ballroom into which you look from the dark night outside and from such a distance that the music is inaudible.... Life may appear senseless to you.
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James Gleick |
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0872d0b
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The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender's mental state.
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James Gleick |
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a31e8a9
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The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal symphonies stirred up in the brain of the listener. The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits.
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James Gleick |
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44da87f
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Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room.
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James Gleick |
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ab2b723
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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.
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James Gleick |
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123f2e9
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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.
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James Gleick |
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a1655ba
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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.
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James Gleick |
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d716856
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Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
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James Gleick |
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48f4a23
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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."
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James Gleick |
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7c62042
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Entropy--already a difficult and poorly understood concept--is a measure of disorder in thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy.
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James Gleick |
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treating messages as discrete had application not just for traditional communication but for a new and rather esoteric subfield, the theory of computing machines.
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James Gleick |
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6188dda
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Theories permit consciousness to 'jump over its own shadow,' to leave behind the given, to represent the transcendent, yet, as is self-evident, only in symbols.
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James Gleick |
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4510fe6
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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.
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geometry
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James Gleick |
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b4c28c0
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The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little space, no more than about five percent of the body.
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geometry
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James Gleick |
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141a371
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The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.
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geometry
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James Gleick |