Quotes by James Gleick

About James Gleick:

James Gleick is 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.”
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

James Gleick

The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and the other, in effect, ringing the set at a distance of infinity.

James Gleick

it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.

James Gleick

Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person’s mind from childhood, information is clearly not just...

James Gleick

IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

James Gleick

The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.

James Gleick

One simple but powerful consequence of the fractal geometry of surfaces is that surfaces in contact do not touch everywhere. The bumpiness at all scales prevents that. Even in rock under enormous pressure, at some sufficiently small scale it becomes ...

James Gleick

the brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imaginati...

James Gleick

the pattern appears so ethereally, that it is hard to remember that the shape is an attractor. It is not just any trajectory of a dynamical system. It is the trajectory toward which all other trajectories converge.

James Gleick

Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.

James Gleick

The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.

James Gleick

The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little space, no more than about five percent of the body.

James Gleick

Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.

James Gleick

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

James Gleick

We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.

James Gleick

Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

James Gleick

Author Bio

  • NameJames Gleick
  • DescriptionAuthor, journalist, and biographer
  • BornAugust 1, 1954
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Journalist
  • WorksThe Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood; Chaos: Making A New Science