James Gleick > Quotes

“When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“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, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“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 can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“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, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“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, and the growth of crystals in ice and metal alloys. The dynamics seem so basic—shapes changing in space and time—yet only now are the tools available to understand them.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.”
― James Gleick

“For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, 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. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying. That was too rich. Most varieties of motion had to be tossed out before Newton’s laws could apply and the Scientific Revolution could succeed. In the nineteenth century, energy began to undergo a similar transformation: natural philosophers adapted a word meaning vigor or intensity. They mathematicized it, giving energy its fundamental place in the physicists’ view of nature.

It was the same with information. A rite of purification became necessary.

And then, when it was made simple, distilled, counted in bits, information was found to be everywhere.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“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.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.”
― James Gleick

“Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“The universe is computing its own destiny.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre. -- Mark Kac”
― James Gleick

“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, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“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.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“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 Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?”
― James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything

“Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Science was constructed against a lot of nonsense,”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“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.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“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, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“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, Chaos: Making a New 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?”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“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.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science