Quotes from James Gleick

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases.

The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender's mental state.

The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal symphonies stirred up in the brain of the listener. The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits.

In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.

They could see from the start that Wilson's idea sat somewhere near the border between possible and hopeless—but on which side of the border?

The Selfish Gene—he set off decades of debate by declaring: "We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

the subject is increased by the fact that while we have to deal with novel and strange facts, we have also to use old words in novel and inconsistent senses.

This was the first time anyone suggested the genome was an information store measurable in bits. Shannon's guess was conservative, by at least four orders of magnitude.

Feynman resented the polished myths of most scientific history, submerging the false steps and halting uncertainties under a surface of orderly intellectual progress, but he created a myth of his own.

He was going to kill Russell's dream of a perfect logical system.

He was going to show that the paradoxes were not excrescences; they were fundamental.

DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level—an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.

By the time Carl was four, Feynman was actively lobbying against a first-grade science book proposed for California schools. It began with pictures of a mechanical wind-up dog, a real dog, and a motorcycle, and for each the same question: "What makes it move?" The proposed answer—"Energy makes it move"—enraged him.

The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex.

Pattern, as he saw it, equals redundancy. In ordinary language, redundancy serves as an aid to understanding. In cryptanalysis, that same redundancy is the Achilles' heel.

That was acceptable, his father told him: you can always try to solve a problem by proving that no solution exists.

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.

Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience.

Information is closely associated with uncertainty." Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information.

Chaos has become not just theory but also method, not just a canon of beliefs but also a way of doing science.

Revolutions do not come piecemeal. One account of nature replaces another.

The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract—a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists have finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence.

A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances.

The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,      As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,      Either in distance, change or nothingness,      The visible transformations of summer night,      An argentine abstraction approaching form      And suddenly denying itself away.