In Isaac Newton’s lifetime, no more than a few thousand people had any idea what he looked like, though he was one of England’s most famous men, yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea—base...
He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially.… In him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him.… He is always and everywhere.… He is all eye, all e...
DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level—an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.
By any objective measure, the modern business of psychopharmacology—the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia itself—has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if...
1. You can’t win; 2. You can’t break even either. But this is the cosmic, fateful one. The universe is running down. It is a degenerative one-way street. The final state of maximum entropy is our dest...
Treating messages as discrete had application not just for traditional communication but for a new and rather esoteric subfield, the theory of computing machines.
When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal, they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After...
One unlikely Luddite was also one of the first long-term beneficiaries. Plato (channeling the nonwriter Socrates) warned that this technology meant impoverishment: For this invention will produce forg...
Nullius in verba was the Royal Society’s motto. Don’t take anyone’s word for it.
Monod proposed an analogy: Just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an abstract kingdom rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas. Ideas have retained...
Memes can replicate with impressive virulence while leaving swaths of collateral damage—patent medicines and psychic surgery, astrology and satanism, racist myths, superstitions, and (a special case)...
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us n...
A file was originally—in sixteenth-century England—a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file...
With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow. Ants deploy their pheromones, trails of chemical information; Theseus unwound Ariadne's thread...
Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing—syllogisms can be spoken as well as written—but it did not. Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis. Logic descended from the written word,...
It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.
The subject is increased by the fact that while we have to deal with novel and strange facts, we have also to use old words in novel and inconsistent senses.
Maybe that’s why young people make success. They don’t know enough. Because when you know enough it’s obvious that every idea that you have is no good.
By the time Carl was four, was actively lobbying against a first-grade science book proposed for California schools. It began with pictures of a mechanical wind-up dog, a real dog, and a motorcycle,...