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James Gleick QUOTES

141 " 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. (Eric Frank Russell, 1941) "

― James Gleick , Time Travel: A History

142 " Nowadays we voyage through time so easily and so well, in our dreams and in our art. Time travel feels like an ancient tradition, rooted in old mythologies, old as gods and dragons. It isn't. Though the ancients imagined immortality and rebirth and lands of the dead time machines were beyond their ken. Time travel is a fantasy of the modern era. When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine, he also invented a new mode of thought. "

― James Gleick , Time Travel: A History

143 " It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong. The "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

144 " Mandelbrot saw a seemingly smooth boundary resolve itself into a chain of spirals like the tails of sea horses. The irrational fertilized the rational. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

145 " The principle is that nature does something against its own will, and by self-entanglement, produces beauty. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

146 " Cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones,” wrote the poet Richard Wilbur, and even in the atomic era it was hard to see how the physicist’s swarming clouds of particles could give rise to the hard-edged world of everyday sight and touch. "

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

147 " Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy. —David L. Watson "

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

148 " A.N. Kolmogorov and Yasha Sinai had worked out some illuminating mathematics for the way a system's "entropy per unit time" applies to the geometric pictures of surfaces stretching and folding in phase space. The conceptual core of the technique was a matter of drawing some arbitrarily small box around some set of initial conditions, as one might draw a small square on the side of a balloon, then calculating the effect of various expressions or twists on the box. It might stretch in one direction, for example, while remaining narrow in the other. The change in area corresponded to an introduction of uncertainty about the system's past, a gain or loss of information. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

149 " The spirit of Edison, not Einstein, still governed their image of the scientist. Perspiration, not inspiration. Mathematics was unfathomable and unreliable. "

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

150 " In fact, few had any concept of “spelling”—the idea that each word, when written, should take a particular predetermined form of letters. The word cony (rabbit) appeared variously as conny, conye, conie, connie, coni, cuny, cunny, and cunnie in a single 1591 pamphlet. "

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

James Gleick QUOTES

151 " They meant to bring back together, as a unified subject, the discipline that had been subdivided for undergraduates into mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and optics. "

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

152 " You lived; you will always have lived. Death does not erase your life. It is mere punctuation. "

― James Gleick , Time Travel: A History

153 " Thinking generates entropy.”) "

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

154 " 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. "

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

155 " The military actively encouraged, when it did not finance directly, the giant cyclotrons, betatrons, synchrotrons, and synchrocyclotrons, any one of which consumed more steel and electricity than a prewar experimentalist could have imagined. These were not so much crumbs from the weapons-development table as they were blank checks from officials persuaded that physics worked miracles. Who could say what was impossible? Free energy? Time travel? Antigravity? In 1954 the secretary of the army invited Feynman to serve as a paid consultant on an army scientific advisory panel, and he agreed, traveling to Washington for several days in November. At a cocktail party after one session, a general confided that what the army really needed was a tank that could use sand as fuel. "

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

156 " In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort. "

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

157 " He used to be from our village, one of us. After he died, the spirits made a mistake and sent him off far away to a village of whites to enter into the body of a little baby who was born of a white woman instead of one of ours. But because he belongs to us, he could not forget where he came from and so he came back.” The villager added generously, “If he is a bit awkward on the drums, this is because of the poor education that the whites gave him.” Carrington’s life in Africa spanned four decades. "

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

158 " The Selfish Gene—he set off decades of debate by declaring: “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. "

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

159 " This was the first time anyone suggested the genome was an information store measurable in bits. Shannon’s guess was conservative, by at least four orders of magnitude. "

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

160 " He was going to kill Russell’s dream of a perfect logical system. "

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