James Gleick Quotes

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

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

About Author

James Gleick (; born August 1, 1954) is an American author and historian of science whose work has chronicled the cultural impact of modern technology. Recognized for his writing about complex subjects through the techniques of narrative nonfiction, he has been called "one of the great science writers of all time". He is part of the inspiration for Jurassic Park character Ian Malcolm.
Gleick's books include the international bestsellers Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011). Three of his books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists; and The Information was awarded the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books in 2012. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Per the Wall Street Journal, "Some writers excel at crafting a historical narrative, others at elucidating esoteric theories, still others at humanizing scientists. Mr. Gleick is a master of all these skills."

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

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 spa...

Information is closely associated with uncertainty. Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus...

For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until appropriated words that were ancient and vague—f...

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

From this point of view, the laws of science represent data compression in action. A theoretical physicist acts like a very clever coding algorithm. The laws of science that have been discovered can b...

We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castl...

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

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 trajecto...

Somehow, after all, as the universe ebbs toward its final equilibrium in the featureless heat bath of maximum entropy, it manages to create interesting structures.

Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of th...

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

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 pres...

Even before the exact answer was reached, Crick crystallized its fundamental principles in a statement that he called (and is called to this day) the Central Dogma. It is a hypothesis about the direct...

The second law, then, is the tendency of the universe to flow from less likely (orderly) to more likely (disorderly) macrostates.

Gregor Mendel’s years of research with green and yellow peas showed that such a thing must exist. Colors and other traits vary depending on many factors, such as temperature and soil content, but some...

The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave. Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor a...

The new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms...