History Quotes by James Gleick

8 History quotes by James Gleick

Gleick’s fascination with the flow of information shines through these eight lines. The selection captures his narrative style, making it a handy snapshot for readers interested in his take on historical currents.

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For a brief time in the 1850s, the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should)…

James Gleick

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Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of…

James Gleick

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For the modern physicist, reality is the whole thing, past and future joined in a single history. The sensation of now is…

James Gleick

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A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great…

James Gleick

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I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History…

James Gleick

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The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

James Gleick

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“Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia.…

James Gleick

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The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of…

James Gleick

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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…

James Gleick

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You know, entropy is associated thermodynamically, in systems involving heat, with disorder. And in an analogous way, information is associated with disorder, which seems…

James Gleick

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“No one has even a definitive spelling for Cawdrey’s name (Cowdrey, Cawdry). But then, no one agreed on the spelling of most names: they…

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“Where, then, is any particular gene—say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata…

James Gleick

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Alphabetical order had to be invented to help people organize the first dictionaries. On the other hand, we may have reached a point where…

James Gleick

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As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers…

James Gleick

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The universe is computing its own destiny.

James Gleick

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A book is not necessarily made of paper. A book is not necessarily made to be read on a Kindle. A book is a…

James Gleick

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“From this point of view, the laws of science represent data compression in action. A theoretical physicist acts like a very clever coding algorithm.…

James Gleick

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Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play…

James Gleick

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“Your body moves always in the present, the dividing line between the past and the future, but your mind is more free. It can…

James Gleick

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People worry about Twitter. Twitter is banal. It's 140-character messages. By definition, you can hardly say anything profound. On the other hand, we communicate.…

James Gleick

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“The Difference Engine stands—for a replica works today, in the Science Museum in London—as a milestone of what could be achieved in precision engineering.…

James Gleick