218 Quotes by James Gleick

You lived; you will always have lived. Death does not erase your life. It is mere punctuation.

Redundancy – inefficient by definition – serves as the antidote to confusion.

China’s official State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television issued a warning and denunciation of time travel in 2011, concerned that such stories interfere with history – “casually.

The Selfish Gene – he set off decades of debate by declaring: “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong. The.

When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver’s watch, that “wonderful kind of engine... a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal,” they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, “he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life.” To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We’re all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?

The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract – a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists have finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence.

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. 'If I do this, what will happen?' is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist.

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer.