218 Quotes by James Gleick

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.

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.

The spot is a self-organizing system, created and regulated by the same nonlinear twists that create the unpredictable turmoil around it. It is stable chaos.

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.

Chaos is a creator of information – another apparent paradox.

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

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.

Maybe that’s why young people make success. They don’t know enough. Because when you know enough it’s obvious that every idea that you have is no good.

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.