218 Quotes by James Gleick

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.

It is not true that people who accomplish things don’t waste time and that people who waste time don’t accomplish things. The very concept is ill-informed. You can’t waste time and you can’t save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.

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

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

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.

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.

There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians’. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they’ve done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre. – Mark Kac.

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

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