"Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote. ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.

James Gleick

Categorized in : Science Energy Richard Feynman

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

James Gleick

people world ideas

I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.

James Gleick

stills

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

James Gleick

amount distribution brain

The microwave oven is one of the modern objects that convey the most elemental feeling of power over the passing seconds ... If you suffer from hurry sickness in its most advanced stages, you may find yourself punching 88 seconds instead of 90 because it is faster to tap the same digit twice.

James Gleick

finding-yourself suffering feelings

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

James Gleick

stories running long

$In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity. by James Gleick$

In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

James Gleick

eye mind way

Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.

James Gleick

google knowing people

Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.

James Gleick

information

The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

James Gleick

mirrors reading past

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

James Gleick

information consciousness attention

You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.

James Gleick

waste moments time

One of the ways the telegraph changed us as humans was it gave us a new sense of what time it is. It gave us an understanding of simultaneity. It gave us the ability to synchronize clocks from one place to another. It made it possible for the world to have standard time and time zones and then Daylight Savings Time and then after that jetlag. All of that is due to the telegraph because, before that, the time was whatever it was wherever you were.

James Gleick

understanding change time

The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.

James Gleick

blow ideas fall

Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.

James Gleick

life-sucks sea order

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.

James Gleick

mad skills player

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

James Gleick

history-of-life life-is negative

Running for president is the new selfie.

James Gleick

president running

The universe is computing its own destiny.

James Gleick

computing destiny universe

To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

James Gleick

chaos becoming states

We choose mania over boredom every time.

James Gleick

mania boredom