Quotes from Charles Seife

Bad information is a disease that attacks the brain. It messes with your head, making you do things that you shouldn't, causing you to make wrong decisions. Just as a potent virus co-opts your cells' machinery, bad information can co-opt your behavior. It can alter the way you interact with the world and, as a result, it can change the world.

Where there is the Infinite there is joy. There is no joy in the finite. —THE CHANDOGYA UPANISHAD

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science. —WILLIAM THOMSON, LORD KELVIN

See appendix A for a proof that Winston Churchill was a carrot.

This is the definition of the infinite: it is something that can stay the same size even when you subtract from it.

With news and data that is tailored to our prejudices, we deprive ourselves of true information. We wind up wallowing in our own false ideas, reflected back at us by the media. The news is ceasing to be a window unto the world; it is becoming a mirror that allows us to gaze only upon our own beliefs.

A bad idea, a wrong piece of information, a digital brain-altering virus can spread at the speed of light through the internet and quickly find a home among a dispersed but digitally interconnected group of true believers. This group acts as a reservoir for the bad idea, allowing it to gather strength and reinfect people; as the group grows, the belief, no matter how crazy, becomes more and more solidly established among the faithful.

Skinnerian conditioning, crossed with social pressure, is now an ever-present invisibly hand that tries to manipulate all of your actions on the internet. This is the hand that is making you act against your own self-interest. Once you recognize it, you see it everywhere, hovering over you, trying to make you click your mouse or press buttons on your smartphone, giving up your valuable time, money, or information in return for little or nothing at all.

Skinnerian conditioning, crossed with social pressure, is now an ever-present invisible hand that tries to manipulate all of your actions on the internet. This is the hand that is making you act against your own self-interest. Once you recognize it, you see it everywhere, hovering over you, trying to make you click your mouse or press buttons on your smartphone, giving up your valuable time, money, or information in return for little or nothing at all.

The justice system can't be totally free of lies and distortion; after all, courts are chock-full of lawyers.

Just as it's important to take the changing value of a dollar into account when comparing spending over time, it's important to take doctors' changing diagnoses into account when looking at disease trends

The infinite zero of a black hole-mass crammed into zero space, curving space infinitely-punches a hole in the smooth rubber sheet. The equations of general relativity cannot deal with the sharpness of zero. In a black hole, space and time are meaningless.

In the battle between Kronecker and Cantor, Cantor would ultimately prevail. Cantor's theory would show that Kronecker's precious integers-and even the rational numbers-were nothing at all. They were an infinite zero.

Christianity initially rejected zero, but trade would soon demand it. The man who reintroduced zero to the West was Leonardo of Pisa. The son of an Italian trader, he traveled to northern Africa. There the young man-better known as Fibonacci-learned Mathematics from the Muslims and soon became a good mathematician in his own right.

Zero dwells at the juxtaposition of quantum mechanics and relativity; zero lives where the two theories meet, and zero causes the two theories to clash. A black hole is a zero in the equations of general relativity; the energy of the vacuum is a zero in the mathematics of quantum theory. The big bang, the most puzzling event in the history of the universe, is a zero in both theories. The universe came from nothing-and both theories break down when they try to explain the origin of the cosmos.

Nature speaks in equations.

Zero is powerful because it is infinity's twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and yang.