218 Quotes by James Gleick

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.

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.

When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean?

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

What English speakers call “computer science” Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik.

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.

The Internet is like a town that leaves its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don’t already know don’t belong.

During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists’ understanding of mutations in DNA.

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.