James Gleick Quotes (15 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick

Genius

James Gleick

James Gleick: 15 quotes 0 likes

Famous James Gleick Quotes

“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.”

James Gleick

“Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.”

James Gleick book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Source: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“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 book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Source: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“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 book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Source: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”

James Gleick book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Source: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it”

James Gleick book Chaos: Making a New Science

Source: Chaos: Making a New Science

James Gleick Quotes about science

“Amid the vast modern network of universities, corporate laboratories, and national science foundations has arisen an awareness that the best financed and best organized of research enterprises have not learned to engender, perhaps not even to recognize, world-tuning originality.”

James Gleick book Genius

James Gleick (1992). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Vintage Books

“It was God who breathed life into matter and inspired its many textures and processes. …Rather than turn away from what he could not explain, he plunged in more deeply. …There were forces in nature that he would not be able to understand mechanically, in terms of colliding billiard balls or swirling vortices. They were vital, vegetable, sexual forces—invisible forces of spirit and attraction. Later, it had been Newton, more than any other philosopher, who effectively purged science of the need to resort to such mystical qualities. For now, he needed them.”

James Gleick

James Gleick, Isaac Newton (2003)

“Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads by choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the subtle disciplines”

James Gleick book Chaos: Making a New Science

Source: Chaos: Making a New Science, 1987, p. 70. James Gleick quotes here Benoît Mandelbrot

James Gleick Quotes

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

James Gleick book Chaos: Making a New Science

Source: Chaos: Making a New Science

Hostility , People , World , Idea

“Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.”

James Gleick book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

"One God One Religion - Brother Hamza Andreas Tzortzis" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q-vmmLFat8, Youtube (April 16, 2018)
Source: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Wisdom , Knowledge

“In the thousands of articles that made up the technical literature of chaos, few were cited more often than "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow." For years, no single object would inspire more illustrations, even motion pictures, than the mysterious curve depicted at the end, the double spiral that became known as the Lorenz attractor.”

James Gleick book Chaos: Making a New Science

Source: Chaos: Making a New Science, 1987, p. 52; as cited in: Joshua Keating, in " Can Chaos theory teach us anything about Foreign Policy http://ideas.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/05/23/can_chaos_theory_teach_us_anything_about_international_relations", at ideas.foreignpolicy.com, May 23rd 2013.

Literature

“Linear relationships can be captured with a straight line on a graph. Linear relationships are easy to think about…. Linear equations are solvable… Linear systems have an important modular virtue: you can take them apart, and put them together again — the pieces add up.”

James Gleick book Chaos: Making a New Science

Hanssen commented: "Following distinctions between linear and nonlinear systems from James Gleick's 1987 book on chaos theory may be helpful."
Source: Chaos: Making a New Science, 1987, p. 23 as cited in: James R. Hansen (2004), Trees of Texas: An Easy Guide to Leaf Identification, p. 246

Thinking

“Chaotic theory is mathematically based on non-linear propositions, "meaning that they expressed relationships that were not strictly proportional. Linear relationships can be captured with a straight line on a graph"”

James Gleick book Chaos: Making a New Science

Source: Chaos: Making a New Science, 1987, p. 23 as cited in John A. Rush (1996), Clinical Anthropology: An Application of Anthropological Concepts, p. 75

Mathematics

“Computer programs are the most intricate, delicately balanced and finely interwoven of all the products of human industry to date. They are machines with far more moving parts than any engine: the parts don't wear out, but they interact and rub up against one another in ways the programmers themselves cannot predict.”

James Gleick

James Gleick (2002). What just happened: a chronicle from the information frontier, p. 19 cited in: George Stepanek (2005), Software Project Secrets: Why Software Projects Fail, p. 10

Way , Parting