“ The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale. 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 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… James Gleick
“ 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… James Gleick
“ 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… James Gleick
“ 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… 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 trajecto… 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 pres… James Gleick
“ The library remains a sacred place for secular folk ["What Libraries Can (Still) Do," The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015]. James Gleick
“ 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… James Gleick
“ 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… James Gleick
“ 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. James Gleick
“ First law: The energy of the universe is constant. Second law: The entropy of the universe always increases. James Gleick
“ The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing James Gleick
“ Despite the metadata attached to each tweet, and despite trails of retweets and 'favorite' tweets, the Twitter corpus lacks the latticework of hyperlinks that makes Google's algorithms so potent. Twit… James Gleick
“ The second law, then, is the tendency of the universe to flow from less likely (orderly) to more likely (disorderly) macrostates. James Gleick
