James Gleick
As the Earth continues to slow, leap seconds will grow more common. Eventually we will need one every year, and then even more. Scientists could have avoided these awkward skips by choosing instead to adjust the duration of the second itself. Who would notice? That is what they did, in fact, until 1955.
Particle physicists may freeze a second, open it up, and explore its dappled contents like surgeons pawing through an abdomen, but in real life, when events occur within thousandths of a second, our minds cannot distinguish past from future.
Nanosecond precision matters for worldwide communications systems. It matters for navigation by Global Positioning System satellite signals: an error of a billionth of a second means an error of just about a foot, the distance light travels in that time.
One measure of twentieth-century time is the supersonic three and three-quarter hours it takes the Concorde to fly from New York to Paris, gate to gate. Other measures come with the waits on the expressways and the runways.
We choose mania over boredom every time.
I'll cheerfully confess to spending a lot of time playing completely disgusting computer games that have no redeeming social value.
A book is not necessarily made of paper. A book is not necessarily made to be read on a Kindle. A book is a collection of text, organized in one of a variety of ways. You could say that words printed on paper and bound between cloth covers will someday be obsolete. But if and when that day comes, there will still be a thing called books.
The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.
A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.
Children and scientists share an outlook on life. 'If I do this, what will happen?' is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist.
I really don't think of myself as a science writer.
Granted, I'm more interested in technology than most people, and less interested in politics than most. But I don't like to think about categories. I really see myself as a general non-fiction writer.
In cyberspace, the Wikipedians never stop gathering: It's a continuous round-the-clock rolling workfest.
Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.
Because everyone in the world has the power to edit, Wikipedia has long been plagued by the so-called edit war. This is like a house where the husband wants it warm and the wife wants it cool and they sneak back and forth adjusting the thermostat at cross purposes.
To continue down the path of comprehensiveness, Wikipedia will need to sustain the astonishing mass fervor of its birth years. Will that be possible? No one knows.
Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.
Patent battles have become a strong catalyst for mergers, reducing competition in various domains. The largest corporations, with gigantic patent portfolios, routinely enter into cross-licensing agreements with their largest competitors.
With the advent of computing, human invention crossed a threshold into a world different from everything that came before. The computer is the universal machine almost by definition, machine-of-all-trades, capable of accomplishing or simulating just about any task that can be logically defined.
Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.Collection: Ideas
It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.Collection: Brain
Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.Collection: Information
Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.Collection: Lying
In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.Collection: Eye
I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.Collection: Stills
It is not true that people who accomplish things don't waste time and that people who waste time don't accomplish things. The very concept is ill-informed. You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.Collection: People
You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.Collection: Time
Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.Collection: Order
The microwave oven is one of the modern objects that convey the most elemental feeling of power over the passing seconds ... If you suffer from hurry sickness in its most advanced stages, you may find yourself punching 88 seconds instead of 90 because it is faster to tap the same digit twice.Collection: Feelings
The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.Collection: Doubt
When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.Collection: Attention
Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.Collection: Player
One of the ways the telegraph changed us as humans was it gave us a new sense of what time it is. It gave us an understanding of simultaneity. It gave us the ability to synchronize clocks from one place to another. It made it possible for the world to have standard time and time zones and then Daylight Savings Time and then after that jetlag. All of that is due to the telegraph because, before that, the time was whatever it was wherever you were.Collection: Change
The Internet is like a town that leaves its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don't already know don't belongCollection: People
It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.Collection: Purpose
The universe is computing its own destiny.Collection: Destiny
Intuition was not just visual but also auditory and kinesthetic. Those who watched Feynman in moments of intense concentration came away with a strong, even disturbing sense of the physicality of the process, as though his brain did not stop with the grey matter but extended through every muscle in his body.Collection: Strong
The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.Collection: Reading
The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.Collection: Fall
The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.Collection: Negative
Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.Collection: Time
The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own.... It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism.Collection: Book
I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.Collection: Book
Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. ... The unfamiliar and the strange - these are the domain of all children and scientists.Collection: Children
Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butter- fly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.Collection: New York
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 the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.Collection: Communication
He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.Collection: Essence
Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.Collection: Book
For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.Collection: Powerful