James Gleick quotes

James Gleick is an American author and historian of science, best known for his works on the history of science and technology. His books popularize complex scientific concepts such as chaos theory and information theory to general readers. He has been nominated for major literary awards and is recognized for making science accessible and engaging. Here are 26 of his quotes:

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

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

James Gleick

Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.

James Gleick

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

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

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

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

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

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

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

We choose mania over boredom every time.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.

James Gleick

Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading - even browsing - an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.

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

The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.

James Gleick

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

James Gleick

At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.

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 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

I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There's a delicate balance.

James Gleick