184
" By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh … the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written.… Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine.* Up to a point, maybe. Yet three centuries earlier, Thomas Hobbes, looking from a vantage where literacy was new, had taken a less rosy view. He could see the preliterate culture more clearly: “Men lived upon gross experience,” he wrote. “There was no method; that is to say, no sowing nor planting of knowledge by itself, apart from the weeds and common plants of error and conjecture.” A sorry place, neither magical nor divine. Was McLuhan right, or was Hobbes? If we are ambivalent, the ambivalence began with Plato. He witnessed writing’s rising dominion; he asserted its force and feared its lifelessness. The writer-philosopher embodied a paradox. The same paradox was destined to reappear in different guises, each technology of information bringing its own powers and its own fears. "
― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
187
" The 1970s were the decade of megabytes. In the summer of 1970, IBM introduced two new computer models with more memory than ever before: the Model 155, with 768,000 bytes of memory, and the larger Model 165, with a full megabyte, in a large cabinet. One of these room-filling mainframes could be purchased for $4,674,160. By 1982 Prime Computer was marketing a megabyte of memory on a single circuit board, for $36,000. "
― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
189
" By contrast, a man who has just learned to read and write responds, “To go by your words, they should all be white.” To go by your words—in that phrase, a level is crossed. The information has been detached from any person, detached from the speaker’s experience. Now it lives in the words, little life-support modules. Spoken words also transport information, but not with the self-consciousness that writing brings. Literate people take for granted their own awareness of words, along with the array of word-related machinery: classification, reference, definition. Before literacy, there is nothing obvious about such techniques. “Try to explain to me what a tree is,” Luria says, and a peasant replies, “Why should I? Everyone knows what a tree is, they don’t need me telling them. "
― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
193
" Astronomers had already found the fingerprints of chaos in violence on the sun's surface, gaps in the asteroid belt, and the distribution of galaxies. Levin and her colleagues have found them in the exit from the big bang and in black holes. They predict that light trapped by a black hole can enter unstable chaotic orbits and be reemited-making the black hole visible, if only briefly. Yes, chaos can light up black holes. "There are rational numbers to mine, fractal sets, and all kinds of truly beautiful consequences," she says. "So on the one hand, people are horrified, on the other they're mesmerized." She does chaos in curved space-time. Einstein would be proud. "
― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science
200
" He asked a colleague to teach him Fortran, and, by the end of the day, for a variety of functions, he had calculated his constant to five decimal places, 4.66920. That night he read about double precision in the manual, and the next day he got as far as 4.6692016090—enough precision to convince Stein. Feigenbaum wasn’t quite sure he had convinced himself, though. He had set out to look for regularity—that was what understanding mathematics meant—but he had also set out knowing that particular kinds of equations, just like particular physical systems, behave in special, characteristic ways. These equations were simple, after all. Feigenbaum understood the quadratic equation, he understood the sine equation—the mathematics was trivial. Yet something in the heart of these very different equations, repeating over and over again, created a single number. He had stumbled upon something: perhaps just a curiosity; perhaps a new law of nature. "
― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science