Quotes from James Gleick

riches have never made people great but love does it every day—we

It had been well known for twenty years that the distribution of large and small earthquakes followed a particular mathematical pattern, precisely the same scaling pattern that seemed to govern the distribution of personal incomes in a free-market economy.

IN THE MIND'S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists' understanding of mutations in DNA.

Nullius in verba was the Royal Society's motto. Don't take anyone's word for it.

Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.

Like Ada Lovelace, Turing was a programmer, looking inward to the step-by-step logic of his own mind. He imagined himself as a computer. He distilled mental procedures into their smallest constituent parts, the atoms of information processing.

In reality, a river's basic shape... is not a line but a tree. A river is, in its essence, a thing that branches... Although it flows inward toward its trunk, in geological time it grew, and continues to grow, outward, like an organism, from its ocean outlet to its many headwaters. In the vernacular of a new science, it is fractal, its structure echoing itself on all scales, from river to stream to brook to creek to rivulet, branches too small to name and too many to count.

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

quoting Tolstoy: "I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

Gregor Mendel's years of research with green and yellow peas showed that such a thing must exist. Colors and other traits vary depending on many factors, such as temperature and soil content, but something is preserved whole; it does not blend or diffuse; it must be quantized. Mendel had discovered the gene, though he did not name it. For him it was more an algebraic convenience than a physical entity.

mandelbrot changed the way ibm's engineers thought about the cause of noise. bursts of errors had always sent the engineers looking for a man sticking a screwdriver somewhere.

By any objective measure, the modern business of "psychopharmacology"—the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia itself—has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if any, are cured. The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one knows.

THE MANDELBROT SET IS the most complex object in mathematics, its admirers like to say. An eternity could not be enough time to see it all, its disks studded with prickly thorns, its spirals and filaments curling outward and around, bearing bulbous molecules that hang, infinitely variegated, like grapes on God's personal vine.

Like the first two revolutions, chaos cuts away at the tenets of Newton's physics. As one 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.

The ceaseless motion and incomprehensible bustle of life. Feigenbaum recalled the words of Gustav Mahler, describing a sensation that he tried to capture in the third movement of his Second Symphony. Like the motions of dancing figures in a brilliantly lit ballroom into which you look from the dark night outside and from such a distance that the music is inaudible…. Life may appear senseless to you.

So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy.

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to the heat death of equilibrium and sameness.… This heat death in physics has a counterpart in the ethics of Kierkegaard, who pointed out that we live in a chaotic moral universe. In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system.… Like the Red Queen, we cannot stay where we are without running as fast as we can.

Before Newton the English word gravity denoted a mood—seriousness, solemnity….

Other people, too, worried about this new gap between the speeds of travel and messaging. An important London banker told Babbage he disapproved: "It will enable our clerks to plunder us, and then be off to Liverpool on their way to America at the rate of twenty miles an hour." Babbage could only express the hope that science might yet find a remedy for the problem it had created.

He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially.… In him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him.… He is always and everywhere.… He is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting.5

Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules.

Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room.

Your body moves always in the present, the dividing line between the past and the future, but your mind is more free. It can think and is in the present. It can remember and at once is in the past. It can imagine and at once is in the future, in its own choice of all the possible futures. Your mind can travel through time. (Eric Frank Russell, 1941)