Quotes from James Gleick

Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy. —David L. Watson (1930)

Believers in chaos-and they sometimes call themselves believers, or converts, or evangelists-speculate about determinism and free will, about evolution, about the nature of conscious intelligence. They feel that they are turning back a trend in science toward reductionism, the analysis of systems in terms of their constituent parts: quarks, chromosomes, or neurons. They believe that they are looking for the whole.

Incompleteness was real. It meant that mathematics could never be proved free of self-contradiction.

By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh . . . the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written. . . . Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine.3

To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

Above all, in a universe ruled by entropy, drawing inexorably toward greater and greater disorder, how does order arise?

Traditionally, when physicists saw complex results, they looked for complex causes. When they saw a random relationship between what goes into a system and what comes out, they assumed that they would have to build randomness into any realistic theory, by artificially adding noise or error.

La escritura daba la impresión que alejaba al hombre del conocimiento, que almacenaba sus recuerdos. También alejaba al orador del oyente, colocándolo a muchos kilómetros o años de distancia.

The adult Feynman asked: If all scientific knowledge were lost in a cataclysm, what single statement would preserve the most information for the next generations of creatures? How could we best pass on our understanding of the world? He proposed, "All things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another

In physics there is slippage. Chance has a part to play. Accidents can happen. Uncertainty is a principle. The world is more complex than any model... The physical laws are a construct, a convenience. They are not coextensive with the universe.

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. Every child is observer, analyst, and taxonomist, building a mental life through a sequence of intellectual revolutions, constructing theories and promptly shedding them when they no longer fit. The unfamiliar and the strange—these are the domain of all children and scientists.

Like other physicists, Feigenbaum used an understated, tough-guy vocabulary to rate such problems. Such a thing is obvious, he might say, meaning that a result could be understood by any skilled physicist after appropriate contemplation and calculation. Not obvious described work that commanded respect and Nobel prizes. For the hardest problems, the problems that would not give way without long looks into the universe's bowels, physicists reserved words like deep.

In physics—or wherever natural processes seem unpredictable—apparent randomness may be noise or may arise from deeply complex dynamics.

Matter is a holograph of itself in its own internal radiation." Forces

Difference in opinion if such there be me thinks shoud not be the occasion of Enmity.

Wilhelm Johannsen, self-consciously invented the word gene.

The information comes via evolution.

Final cause is cause based on purpose or design: a wheel is round because that shape makes transportation possible. Physical cause is mechanical: the earth is round because gravity pulls a spinning fluid into a spheroid. The distinction is not always so obvious. A drinking glass is round because that is the most comfortable shape to hold or drink from. A drinking glass is round because that is the shape naturally assumed by spun pottery or blown glass.

Implicitly, the mission of many twentieth-century scientists — biologists, neurologists, economists — has been to break their universes down into the simplest atoms that will obey scientific rules.

The repetitions were never quite exact. There was pattern, with disturbances. An orderly disorder.

information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.

Every new molecule would be surrounded by its own spirals and flame like projections, and those, inevitably, would reveal molecules tinier still, always similar, never identical, fulfilling some mandate of infinite variety, a miracle of miniaturisation in which every new detail was sure to be a universe of its own, diverse and entire.

The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.

Had he stopped with the Butterfly Effect, an image of predictability giving way to pure randomness, then Lorenz would have produced no more than a piece of very bad news. But Lorenz saw more than randomness embedded in his weather model. He saw a fine geometrical structure, order masquerading as randomness.