Quotes from James Gleick

The Butterfly Effect was no accident; it was necessary.

Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. Steven Wright

In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large.

It is fitting that history attached Morse's name to his code, more than to his device.

poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, at

Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules. [...] Analyzing the behavior of a nonlinear equation like the Navier-Stokes equation is like walking through a maze whose walls rearrange themselves with each step you take.

Shannon used a phrase he had never used before: "information theory.

Not by accident, he made scientists seem less than perfect rationalists.

Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy:

By contrast, a twentieth-century fluid dynamicist could hardly expect to advance knowledge in his field without first adopting a body of terminology and mathematical technique. In return, unconsciously, he would give up much freedom to question the foundations of his science.

Nature was constrained. Disorder was channeled, it seemed, into patterns with some common underlying theme.

Some carry out their work explicitly denying that it is a revolution; others deliberately use Kuhn's language of paradigm shifts to describe the changes they witness.

a confused heap of mingle-mangle").

in 1910 a Danish botanist, Wilhelm Johannsen, self-consciously invented the word gene. He was at pains to correct the common mythology and thought a word might help. The myth was this: that "personal qualities" are transmitted from parent to progeny. This is "the most naïve and oldest conception of heredity," Johanssen said in a speech to the American Society of Naturalists. It was understandable.

Bits in the ether.

Information is entropy. This was the strangest and most powerful notion of all.

The telegraphic style banishes all the forms of politeness

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.

Human computers had no future, he saw:

believed, as deeply as he believed anything, that mathematics should be something all by itself. With self-containment came clarity. And clarity, too, went hand in hand with the rigor of the axiomatic method. Every serious mathematician understands that rigor is the defining strength of the discipline, the steel skeleton without which all would collapse. Rigor is what allows mathematicians to pick up a line of thought that extends over centuries and continue it, with a firm guarantee.

Feynman—mystifyingly brilliant at calculating, strangely ignorant of the literature, passionate about physics, reckless about proof—had for once overestimated his ability to charm and persuade these great physicists.

What we call the past is built on bits. —John Archibald Wheeler

Given an approximate knowledge of a system's initial conditions and an understanding of natural law, one can calculate the approximate behavior of the system.

Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things. That was why scientists played with toys.