Quotes from James Gleick

In cyberspace, the Wikipedians never stop gathering: It's a continuous round-the-clock rolling workfest.

we will have learned to understand and express all of physics in the language of information.

A movement had begun, and the discovery of universality spurred it forward. In the summer of 1977, two physicists, Joseph Ford and Giulio Casati, organized the first conference on a science called chaos. It was held in a gracious villa in Como, Italy

Or so Feynman argued: the philosophers themselves, he said, were always a tempo behind, like tourists moving in after the explorers have left.

Although Mandelbrot made the most comprehensive geometric use of it, the return of scaling ideas to science in the 1960s and 1970s became an intellectual current that made itself felt simultaneously in many places.

Scaling also became part of a movement in physics that led, more directly than Mandelbrot's own work, to the discipline known as chaos.

In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It's abundantly obvious that one doesn't know the world around us in detail. What artists have accomplished is realizing that there's only a small amount of stuff that's important, and then seeing what it was.

They had a game they would play, sitting at a coffeehouse. They would ask: How far away is the nearest strange attractor? Was it that rattling automobile fender? That flag snapping erratically in a steady breeze? A fluttering leaf? You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it, Shaw said, echoing Thomas S. Kuhn.

SINCE EUCLIDEAN MEASUREMENTS—length, depth, thickness—failed to capture the essence of irregular shapes, Mandelbrot turned to a different idea, the idea of dimension. Dimension is a quality with a much richer life for scientists than for non-scientists.

With Ruysdael and Turner, if you look at the way they construct complicated water, it is clearly done in an iterative way. There's some level of stuff, and then stuff painted on top of that, and then corrections to that. Turbulent fluids for those painters is always something with a scale idea in it.

This is still the legacy of Euclidean geometry, where space has three dimensions, a plane has two, a line has one, and a point has zero.

But information is physical.

Mandelbrot moved beyond dimensions 0,1,2,3…to a seeming impossibility: fractional dimensions. The notion is a conceptual high-wire act. For nonmathematicians it requires a willing suspension of disbelief. Yet it proves extraordinarily powerful.

Even when money seemed to be material treasure, heavy in pockets and ships' holds and bank vaults, it always was information. Coins and notes, shekels and cowries were all just short-lived technologies for tokenizing information about who owns what.

Mandelbrot created the word (noun and adjective, English and French) fractal.

quoting Tolstoy: "I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." Many

Truly random data remains spread out in an undefined mess. But chaos-deterministic and patterned-pulls the data into visible shapes. Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

If you knew where you were, there was no way of knowing where you were going and conversely, if you knew where you were going, there was no way of knowing where you were....

orderly disorder created by simple processes. Truly random data remains spread out in an undefined mess. But chaos—deterministic and patterned—pulls the data into visible shapes. Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability.

In private, with pencil on scratch paper, he labored over aphorisms that he later delivered in spontaneous-seeming lectures: Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Intuition is not something that is given. I've trained my intuition to accept as obvious shapes which were initially rejected as absurd, and I find everyone else can do the same.

His studies of irregular patterns in natural processes and his exploration of infinitely complex shapes had an intellectual intersection: a quality of self-similarity. Above all, fractal meant self-similar.

In space, free of friction, periodic motion comes from the orbits of heavenly bodies, but on earth virtually any regular oscillation comes from some cousin of the pendulum. Basic electronic circuits are described by equations exactly the same as those describing a swinging bob. The electronic oscillations are millions of times faster, but the physics is the same.