218 Quotes by James Gleick

Before Newton the English word gravity denoted a mood—seriousness, solemnity….

As the physicist Murray Gell-Mann once remarked: “Faculty members are familiar with a certain kind of person who looks to the mathematicians like a good physicist and looks to the physicists like a good mathematician. Very properly, they do not want that kind of person around.

For Wiener, entropy was a measure of disorder; for Shannon, of uncertainty. Fundamentally, as they were realizing, these were the same.

Every new molecule would be surrounded by its own spirals and flame like projections, and those, inevitably, would reveal molecules tinier still, always similar, never identical, fulfilling some mandate of infinite variety, a miracle of miniaturisation in which every new detail was sure to be a universe of its own, diverse and entire.

The library remains a sacred place for secular folk ["What Libraries Can (Still) Do," The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].

In 1962 the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh, warned his colleagues that human existence was undergoing a “Great Mutation”—so sudden and so radical “that we are now suffering something like historical amnesia.” He lamented the decline of reading; the distancing from nature (which he blamed in part on “ugly yellow Kodak boxes” and “the transistor radio everywhere”); and the loss of shared culture.

Somehow the wondrous promise of the earth is that there are beautiful things in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them." He put the cigarette down. Smoke rose from the ashtray, first in a thin column then (with a nod to universality) in broken tendrils that swirled up to the ceiling.

Hugo Gernsback invented pulp magazines and the grandfather paradox. Not bad for a charlatan.

Feynman resented the polished myths of most scientific history, submerging the false steps and halting uncertainties under a surface of orderly intellectual progress, but he created a myth of his own.