218 Quotes by James Gleick

Cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones,” wrote the poet Richard Wilbur, and even in the atomic era it was hard to see how the physicist’s swarming clouds of particles could give rise to the hard-edged world of everyday sight and touch.

Somehow, after all, as the universe ebbs toward its final equilibrium in the featureless heat bath of maximum entropy, it manages to create interesting structures.

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?

Geniuses of certain kinds – mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers – seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.

The 1970s were the decade of megabytes. In the summer of 1970, IBM introduced two new computer models with more memory than ever before: the Model 155, with 768,000 bytes of memory, and the larger Model 165, with a full megabyte, in a large cabinet. One of these room-filling mainframes could be purchased for $4,674,160. By 1982 Prime Computer was marketing a megabyte of memory on a single circuit board, for $36,000.

Like Ada Lovelace, Turing was a programmer, looking inward to the step-by-step logic of his own mind. He imagined himself as a computer. He distilled mental procedures into their smallest constituent parts, the atoms of information processing.

They meant to bring back together, as a unified subject, the discipline that had been subdivided for undergraduates into mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and optics.

Gregor Mendel’s years of research with green and yellow peas showed that such a thing must exist. Colors and other traits vary depending on many factors, such as temperature and soil content, but something is preserved whole; it does not blend or diffuse; it must be quantized. Mendel had discovered the gene, though he did not name it. For him it was more an algebraic convenience than a physical entity.

Nowadays we voyage through time so easily and so well, in our dreams and in our art. Time travel feels like an ancient tradition, rooted in old mythologies, old as gods and dragons. It isn’t. Though the ancients imagined immortality and rebirth and lands of the dead time machines were beyond their ken. Time travel is a fantasy of the modern era. When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine, he also invented a new mode of thought.