James Gleick

Quotes

• “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.”

• “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.”

• “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.”

• “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”

• “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.”

Books by James Gleick in order

Books by James Gleick in the order they were published, from Chaos (1987) to Time Travel (2016).

1. 1ChaosChaos1987
2. 2Chaos X10 S/W WhsChaos X10 S/W Whs1988
3. 3Nature's ChaosNature's Chaos1990
4. 4GeniusGenius1992
5. 5Genius Export X12 D/BGenius Export X12 D/B1992
6. 6Genius Hb D/Bx12Genius Hb D/Bx121992
7. 7Genius Hb S/Wx10Genius Hb S/Wx101992
8. 8Genius Pb TspGenius Pb Tsp1993
9. 9Genius B D/Bx18Genius B D/Bx181994
10. 10FasterFaster1999
11. 11The Best American Science Writing 2000The Best American Science Writing 20002000
12. 12What Just HappenedWhat Just Happened2002
13. 13Isaac NewtonIsaac Newton2003
14. 14The InformationThe Information2011
15. 15Time TravelTime Travel2016