For a brief time in the 1850s, the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should)… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
For the modern physicist, reality is the whole thing, past and future joined in a single history. The sensation of now is… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
“Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia.… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
