Quotes from James Gleick

If you could write down the solution to a differential equation," Yorke said, "then necessarily it's not chaotic, because to write it down, you must find regular invariants, things that are conserved, like angular momentum. You find enough of these things, and that lets you write down a solution. But this is exactly the way to eliminate the possibility of chaos.

The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing

To find the new x, the rule was to take the old y, add 1 and subtract 1.4 times the old x squared. To find the new y, multiply 0.3 by the old x. That is: xnew = y +1 – 1.4x2 and ynew = 0.3x. Hénon picked a starting point more or less at random, took his calculator and started plotting new points, one after another, until he had plotted thousands.

The demon replaces chance with purpose. It uses information to reduce entropy.

Small nonlinearities were easy to disregard. People who conduct experiments learn quickly that they live in an imperfect world.

In the context of that debate, chaos brought an astonishing message: simple deterministic models could produce what looked like random behavior. The behavior actually had an exquisite fine structure, yet any piece of it seemed indistinguishable from noise. The discovery cut through the heart of the controversy. As May looked at more and more biological systems through the prism of simple chaotic models, he continued to see results that violated the standard intuition of practitioners.

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

whether it means anything to ask why we're here....

In a quirk of political fate, Libchaber's own life was saved by the protection of a local chief of the Pétain secret police, a man whose fervent right-wing beliefs were matched only by his fervent antiracism. After the war, the ten-year–old boy returned the favor. He testified, only half-comprehending, before a war crimes commission, and his testimony saved the man.

THE ATTRACTOR OF HÉNON. A simple combination of folding and stretching produced an attractor that easy to compute yet still poorly understood by mathematicians. As thousands, the millions of points appear, more and more detail emerges. What appear to be single lines prove, on magnification, to be pairs, then pairs of pairs. Yet whether any two successive points appear nearby or far apart is unpredictable.

The birth of information theory came with its ruthless sacrifice of meaning—the very quality that gives information its value and its purpose. Introducing

For him knowledge did not describe; it acted and accomplished.

The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying.

As an element in the world revealed by computer exploration, the strange attractor began as a mere possibility, marking a place where many great imaginations in the twentieth century had failed to go. Soon, when scientists saw what computers had to show, it seemed like a face they had been seeing everywhere, in the music of turbulent flows or in clouds scattered like veils across the sky. Nature was constrained. Disorder was channeled, it seemed, into patterns with some common underlying theme.

Information can be considered as order wrenched from disorder.

Names are not the things they name. Classes are not coextensive with subclasses.

Mathematicians had to accept the fact that systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom-untrammeled nature expressing itself in a turbulent waterfall or an unpredictable brain-required a phase space of infinite dimensions. But who could handle such a thing? It was a hydra, merciless and uncontrollable, and it was Landau's image for turbulence: infinite modes, infinite degrees of freedom, infinite dimensions.

An attractor like Lorenz's illustrated the stability and the hidden structure of a system that otherwise seemed patternless, but how did this peculiar double spiral help researchers exploring unrelated systems? No one knew.

Order in chaos. It was science's oldest cliché. The idea of hidden unity and common underlying form in nature had an intrinsic appeal, and it had an unfortunate history of inspiring pseudoscientists and cranks. When Feigenbaum came to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1974, a year shy of his thirtieth birthday, he knew that if physicists were to make something of the idea now, they would need a practical framework, a way to turn ideas into calculations.

The library remains a sacred place for secular folk [What Libraries Can (Still) Do, The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].

They had talked about turbulence, but time passed, and even Carruthers was no longer sure where Feigenbaum was headed. "I thought he had quit and found a different problem. Little did I know that this other problem was the same problem. It seems to have been the issue on which many different fields of science were stuck—they were stuck on this aspect of the nonlinear behavior of systems.

Still, to understand how the human mind sorts through the chaos of perception, surely one would need to understand how disorder can produce universality.

Time is a feature of creation, and the creator remains apart from it, transcendent over it. Does that mean that all our mortal time and history is, for God, a mere instant—complete and entire? For God outside of time, God in eternity, time does not pass; events do not occur step by step; cause and effect are meaningless. He is not one-thing-after-another, but all-at-once. His "now" encompasses all time. Creation is a tapestry, or an Einsteinian block universe.

In reasonably simple form, galactic orbits can be treated like the orbits of planets around a sun, with one exception: the central gravity source is not a point, but a disk with thickness in three dimensions.