Quotes from Charles Seife

wolf bone was the Stone Age equivalent of a supercomputer.

Gone were the days when Americans were forced to pick one of three nightly news broadcasts. Now there are so many outlets that we suddenly have the ability to find the source of news that makes us the least uncomfortable.

fictional Iraqi projects to build weapons of mass destruction. The administration used nonexistent weapons as the justification for invading Iraq, and by the time the lies were uncovered it was far too late.

Information is that which defies expectation.

moratorium on all nuclear testing—was delayed for more than a decade. It only came to be in 1996, during the Clinton administration. Though the president signed the treaty, Democrats had since lost control of Congress, and the Republican Senate refused to ratify it. As a result, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty remains in legal limbo unto this day.

Zero was the solution to the problem. By around 300 BC the Babylonians had started using two slanted wedges, , to represent an empty space, an empty column on the abacus. This placeholder mark made it easy to tell which position a symbol was in.

numbers have a hold on us. They are powerful—almost mystical. Because we think that numbers represent truth, it's hard for us to imagine that a number can be made to lie.

December 31, 1999—not so for December 31, 2000. Everybody celebrated the turn of the millennium on the wrong date.

presented in an honest and straightforward manner. A little mathematical sophistication—and a little practice—allows you to recognize errors of randumbness, causuistry, and regression to the moon; once you get used to spotting phony patterns and false connections, you'll begin to see them everywhere.

The internet's vast interconnectivity made it possible for everyone to hear everyone else—and to be heard by everyone else. This is perhaps the most important and radical change wrought by digital information.

Quantum mechanics has a similar problem, a problem related to the zero-point energy. The laws of quantum mechanics treat particles such as the electron as points; that is, they take up no space at all. The electron is a zero-dimensional object, and its very zerolike nature ensures that scientists don't even know the electron's mass or charge.

Livermore scientists still insist that they have good reason to trust the computer's more recent predictions. They claim to have experiments that back up the computer code, but it is impossible to tell, from the outside, whether they are telling the truth.

By 2007—just three years after the first report of Morgellons—the CDC received about twelve hundred reports of Morgellons, triggering the inquiry. This was quite remarkable, given that the disease doesn't really exist.

Pythagoras concluded that ratios govern not only music but also all other types of beauty. To the Pythagoreans, ratios and proportions controlled musical beauty, physical beauty, and mathematical beauty. Understanding nature was as simple as understanding the mathematics of proportions.

In other words, the diagonal of that square is irrational—and nowadays we recognize that number as the square root of two.

Any idea, no matter how bizarre, can seem mainstream if you're able to find a handful of others who will believe along with you.

Particles are constantly winking in and out of existence, like tiny Cheshire cats.

The number-shape duality in Greek numbers made it easy; after all, zero didn't

Once we crack the problem of fusion, we have an assured source of energy for as long as you want to think about it. It will cease to be a reason for war or an influence on foreign affairs.

Without periodic nuclear testing, weaponeers argued, they could not be certain that the weapons in the nuclear stockpile would work. Nuclear bombs, like any other machines, decay over time.

In string theory, zero has been banished from the universe; there is no such thing as zero distance or zero time. This solves all the infinity problems of quantum mechanics.

Amazon can deal directly with writers and publish—and distribute—their work to the public, what need is there for the publishing houses? The means of production are in the hands of the masses now, not in the hands of the elites.

It would take only a few thousand terabytes of hard-drive space to archive a human's entire audiovisual experience from cradle to grave.

Scientists would then build a demonstration fusion power plant that would begin operations in 2035 or 2040. After five decades of broken promises, lies, delusions, and self-deception, it will finally be true. Fusion energy will be thirty years away.