James Gleick Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

As Feynman said, the hadron-hadron work [in the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, SLAC] was like trying to figure out a pocket watch by smashing two of them together and watching the pieces fly out.

James Gleick
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
We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.

James Gleick
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
Physicists' models are like maps: never final, never complete until they grow as large and complex as the reality they represent.

James Gleick
Einstein's relativity did not speak to human values. Those were, or were not, relative for reasons unrelated to the physics of objects moving at near-light speed. Borrowing metaphors from the technical sciences could be a dangerous practice.

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

James Gleick
He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

James Gleick
Quantum mechanics taught that a particle was not a particle but a smudge, a traveling cloud of possibilities...

James Gleick
Intuition was not just visual but also auditory and kinesthetic. Those who watched Feynman in moments of intense concentration came away with a strong, even disturbing sense of the physicality of the process, as though his brain did not stop with the grey matter but extended through every muscle in his body.

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

James Gleick
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.... The unfamiliar and the strange - these are the domain of all children and scientists.

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

James Gleick
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
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
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
Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.

James Gleick
Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had....

James Gleick
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