James Gleick
James Gleick
James Gleickis an American author, historian of science, and sometime Internet pioneer whose work has chronicled the cultural impact of modern technology. Recognized for illuminating complex subjects through the techniques of narrative nonfiction, he has been called “one of the great science writers of all time.” Gleick's books include the international bestsellers Chaos: Making a New Science and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Three of them have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists; and The...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 August 1954
CountryUnited States of America
Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.
To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.
When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
We choose mania over boredom every time.
Running for president is the new selfie.
In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
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.
Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.
Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.
It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.
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.
Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.
I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.
Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.