Quotes from James Gleick

Entropy—already a difficult and poorly understood concept—is a measure of disorder in thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy.

Hugo Gernsback invented pulp magazines and the grandfather paradox. Not bad for a charlatan.

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He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing. The alternative to uncertainty is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.

An epidemic of measles broke out, and Dr. Moses Greeley Parker worried that if the operators succumbed, they would be hard to replace. He suggested identifying each telephone by number. He also suggested listing the numbers in an alphabetical directory of subscribers.

Of course, the entire effort is to put oneself Outside the ordinary range Of what are called statistics. —STEPHEN SPENDER

Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality.

treating messages as discrete had application not just for traditional communication but for a new and rather esoteric subfield, the theory of computing machines.

Wikipedia features a popular article called "Errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia." This article is, of course, always in flux. All Wikipedia is. At any moment the reader is catching a version of truth on the wing.

Even when a damped, driven system is at equilibrium, it is not at equilibrium

It may be that all the laws of energy, and all the properties of matter, and all the chemistry of all the colloids are as powerless to explain the body as they are impotent to comprehend the soul. For my part, I think not." D'Arcy Thompson

The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits.

Theories permit consciousness to 'jump over its own shadow,' to leave behind the given, to represent the transcendent, yet, as is self-evident, only in symbols.

Somehow the wondrous promise of the earth is that there are things beautiful in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them.

So was the Buddha (as translated via Borges): "The man of a past moment has lived, but he does not live nor will he live; the man of a future moment will live, but he has not lived nor does he now live; the man of the present moment lives, but he has not lived nor will he live." We

In The Pickwick Papers, a man is said to have read up in the Britannica on Chinese metaphysics. There was, however, no such article: "He read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information.

This free use of the line for flirtation purposes has grown to an alarming extent," he wrote, "and if it is to go on somebody must pay for it." The Bell companies tried to discourage frivolous telephony, particularly by women and servants.

He despised philosophy as soft and unverifiable. Philosophers "are always on the outside making stupid remarks," he said, and the word he pronounced philozawfigal was a mocking epithet, but his influence was philosophical anyway, particularly for younger physicists.

Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times.

Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.

the library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: "Our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library." As a tradition barely a century and a half old in the United States, it gives physical form to the principle that public access to knowledge is the foundation of democracy [What Libraries Can (Still) Do, The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].

Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.

Five years ago the Library of Congress began a project that collects every utterance on Twitter, in the name of preserving the nation's digital heritage. That is billions weekly, sucked up for storage in secure tape archives, and the Library has yet to figure out how to make any of it available to researchers. Divorced from a human curator, the unfiltered mass of Twitter may as well be a garbage heap [What Libraries Can (Still) Do, The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].

The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto, ). The alphabet was invented only once.