Quotes from James Gleick

physicist put it: "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.

The code became known as the dot-and-dash alphabet, but the unmentioned space remained just as important; Morse code was not a binary language.*) That

John Henry Newman, poet and priest, wrote that "time is not a common property; / But what is long is short, and swift is slow/And near is distant, as received and grasped / By this mind and by that, / And every one is standard of his own chronology.

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.

Everyone knew that the weather was such a system—aperiodic. Nature is full of others: animal populations that rise and fall almost regularly, epidemics that come and go on tantalizingly near-regular schedules. If the weather ever did reach a state exactly like one it had reached before, every gust and cloud the same, then presumably it would repeat itself forever after and the problem of forecasting would become trivial.

On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Libchaber's spectrum diagrams showed vividly the precise pattern of period-doubling predicted by the theory. The spikes of new frequencies stand out clearly above the experimental noise. Feigenbaum's scaling theory predicted not only when and where the new frequencies would arrive but also how strong they would be-their amplitudes.

The Butterfly Effect acquired a technical name: sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

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.

They reached Albuquerque, Dyson seeing for the first time the deceptively clear air and the red desert beneath still snowy peaks. Feynman bore into town at 70 miles per hour and was immediately arrested for a rapid sequence of traffic violations. The justice of the peace announced that the fine he handed down was a personal record.

The potential application of a piece of pure thought can never be predicted

Samuel Butler had said a century earlier—and did not claim to be the first—that a hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. Butler was quite serious, in his way:

The Butterfly Effect was the reason. For small pieces of weather—and to a global forecaster, small can mean thunderstorms and blizzards—any prediction deteriorates rapidly. Errors and uncertainties multiply, cascading upward through a chain of turbulent features, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies that only satellites can see.

In theory the World War II atomic bomb project was a problem in nuclear physics. In reality the nuclear physics had been mostly solved before the project began, and the business that occupied the scientists assembled at Los Alamos was a problem in fluid dynamics.

So by 1880, four years after Bell conveyed the words "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you," and three years after the first pair of telephones rented for twenty dollars, more than sixty thousand telephones were in use in the United States.

The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The

And where did logic belong? To psychology or to computer science? Surely not just to philosophy.

The resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly, bits.

Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition," Kuhn wrote.

However complex a given state of the world may be, the difference between that state of the world and some alternative state of the world may be caused by something extremely simple

Then there are revolutions. A new science arises out of one that has reached a dead end. Often a revolution has an interdisciplinary character—its central discoveries often come from people straying outside the normal bounds of their specialties. The problems that obsess these theorists are not recognized as legitimate lines of inquiry.

En las doctrinas de la evolución cultural, un meme es un -replicador- y un propagador: una idea, una moda, una cadena de mensajes o una teoría de la conspiración. En un mal día, un meme es un virus.

But Yorke had offered more than a mathematical result. He had sent a message to physicists: Chaos is ubiquitous; it is stable; it is structured. He also gave reason to believe that complicated systems, traditionally modeled by hard continuous differential equations, could be understood in terms of easy discrete maps.

Alan Turing once whimsically proposed a number N, defined as "the odds against a piece of chalk leaping across the room and writing a line of Shakespeare on the board."?