Quotes from James Gleick

It was the perception of color, to Goethe, that was universal and objective. What scientific evidence was there for a definable real-world quality of redness independent of our perception?

He suspected that when Feynman wanted to know what an electron would do under given circumstances he merely asked himself, "If I were an electron, what would I do?

Many relay stations meant many chances for error. Children everywhere know this, from playing the messaging game known in Britain as Chinese Whispers, in China as , in Turkey as From Ear to Ear, and in the modern United States simply as Telephone. When

It happens that the equations of fluid flow are in many contexts dimensionless, meaning that they apply without regard to scale. Scaled-down airplane wings and ship propellers can be tested in wind tunnels and laboratory basins. And, with some limitations, small storms act like large storms.

Sometimes he and his father would work out puzzles together. Once they came upon a particularly difficult problem that turned out to be insoluble. That was acceptable, his father told him: you can always try to solve a problem by proving that no solution exists. Lorenz liked that, as he always liked the purity of mathematics

A system like a globular cluster is far too complex to be treated directly as a many-body problem, but its dynamics can be studied with the help of certain compromises.

Blood vessels, from aorta to capillaries, form another kind of continuum. They branch and divide and branch again until they become so narrow that blood cells are forced to slide through single file. The nature of their branching is fractal.

A bit, fundamentally, is always a coin toss.

So in 1910 a Danish botanist, Wilhelm Johannsen, self-consciously invented the word gene.

WHERE CHAOS BEGINS, classical science stops.

An animal's ability to absorb oxygen is roughly proportional to the surface area of its lungs. Typical human lungs pack in a surface bigger than a tennis court. As an added complication, the labyrinth of windpipes must merge efficiently with the arteries and veins.

To separate the effects of gravity on a given mass from the effects of air resistance was a brilliant intellectual achievement. It allowed Galileo to close in on the essence of inertia and momentum. Still, in the real world, pendulums eventually do exactly what Aristotle's quaint paradigm predicted. They stop.

A Beaux-Arts paragon like the Paris Opera has no scale because it has every scale. An observer seeing the building from any distance finds some detail that draws the eye. The composition changes as one approaches and new elements of the structure come into play.

Such orbits are not completely regular, since they never exactly repeat themselves, but they are certainly predictable, and they are far from chaotic. Points never arrive inside the curve or outside it. Translated back to the full three-dimensional picture, the orbits were outlining a torus, or doughnut shape, and Hénon's mapping was a cross-section of the torus. So far, he was merely illustrating what all his predecessors had taken for granted. Orbits were periodic.

Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability." Of the three, the revolution in chaos applies to the universe we see and touch, to objects at human scale.

By our century, dissipative processes like friction were recognized, and students learned to include them in equations. Students also learned that nonlinear systems were usually unsolvable, which was true, and that they tended to be exceptions—which was not true.

Several chaos-minded cardiologists found that the frequency spectrum of heartbeat timing, like earthquakes and economic phenomena, followed fractal laws, and they argued that one key to understanding heartbeat timing was the fractal organization of the His-Purkinje network, a labyrinth of branching pathways organized to be self-similar on smaller and smaller scales.

The mathematics applied to fluid systems and to electrical systems. But almost no one in the classical era suspected the chaos that could lurk in dynamical systems if nonlinearity was given its due.

DNA surely cannot specify the vast number of bronchi, bronchioles, and alveoli or the particular spatial structure of the resulting tree, but it can specify a repeating process of bifurcation and development.

In terms of aesthetic values, the new mathematics of fractal geometry brought hard science in tune with the peculiarly modern feeling for untamed, uncivilized, undomesticated nature.

In PM, as Gödel said, "one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

There must be truths, that is, that cannot be proved—and Gödel could prove it.

Typical human lungs pack in a surface bigger than a tennis court.