Quotes from James Gleick

When McLuhan announced that the medium was the message, he was being arch. The medium is both opposite to, and entwined with, the message.)

God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies which we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be showne.…

The Difference Engine stands—for a replica works today, in the Science Museum in London—as a milestone of what could be achieved in precision engineering. In the composition of its alloys, the exactness of its dimensions, the interchangeability of its parts, nothing surpassed this segment of an unfinished machine. Still, it was a curio. And it was as far as Babbage could go.

Somehow the wondrous promise of the earth is that there are beautiful things in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them. He put the cigarette down. Smoke rose from the ashtray, first in a thin column then (with a nod to universality) in broken tendrils that swirled up to the ceiling.

Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.

China's official State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television issued a warning and denunciation of time travel in 2011, concerned that such stories interfere with history—"casually

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong. The

Mandelbrot saw a seemingly smooth boundary resolve itself into a chain of spirals like the tails of sea horses. The irrational fertilized the rational.

God plays dice with the universe," is Ford's answer to Einstein's famous question. "But they're loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends.

One simple but powerful consequence of the fractal geometry of surfaces is that surfaces in contact do not touch everywhere. The bumpiness at all scales prevents that. Even in rock under enormous pressure, at some sufficiently small scale it becomes clear that gaps remain, allowing fluid to flow.

The principle is that nature does something against its own will, and by self-entanglement, produces beauty.

the pattern appears so ethereally, that it is hard to remember that the shape is an attractor. It is not just any trajectory of a dynamical system. It is the trajectory toward which all other trajectories converge.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them").

Here was one coin with two sides. Here was order, with randomness emerging, and then one step further away was randomness with its own underlying order.

Cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones," wrote the poet Richard Wilbur, and even in the atomic era it was hard to see how the physicist's swarming clouds of particles could give rise to the hard-edged world of everyday sight and touch.

In 1962 the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh , warned his colleagues that human existence was undergoing a "Great Mutation"—so sudden and so radical "that we are now suffering something like historical amnesia." He lamented the decline of reading; the distancing from nature (which he blamed in part on "ugly yellow Kodak boxes" and "the transistor radio everywhere"); and the loss of shared culture.

Plato is my friend, but truth my greater friend.

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

The spirit of Edison, not Einstein, still governed their image of the scientist. Perspiration, not inspiration. Mathematics was unfathomable and unreliable.

They meant to bring back together, as a unified subject, the discipline that had been subdivided for undergraduates into mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and optics.

You lived; you will always have lived. Death does not erase your life. It is mere punctuation.

The second law, then, is the tendency of the universe to flow from less likely (orderly) to more likely (disorderly) macrostates.

Thomas Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, resisted his era's new-media hype: "The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter." Up to a point, he was right. Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Thinking generates entropy.")