Quote by Charles Seife

““This is the definition of the infinite: it is something that can stay the same size even when you subtract from it.””

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.1 out of 5 (7 ratings)

More by Charles Seife

“A bad idea, a wrong piece of information, a digital brain-altering virus can spread at the speed of light through the internet and quickly find a home among a dispersed but digitally interconnected group of true believers. This group acts as a reservoir for the bad idea, allowing it to gather strength and reinfect people; as the group grows, the…

Charles Seife

“The key to a black hole's strange properties is the way it curves space-time. A black hole takes up no space at all, but it still has mass. Since the black hole has mass, it causes space-time to curve. Normally, this would not cause a problem. As you approach a heavy star, the curvature gets greater and greater, but once…

Charles Seife

“In string theory, zero has been banished from the universe; there is no such thing as zero distance or zero time. This solves all…

Charles Seife

Image

“Zero and infinity are eternally locked in a struggle to engulf all the numbers. Like a Manichaean nightmare, the two sit on opposite poles of the number sphere, sucking numbers in like tiny black holes. Take any number on the plane. For the sake of argument, we'll choose i/2. Square it. Cube it. Raise it to the fourth power. The…

Charles Seife

“Skinnerian conditioning, crossed with social pressure, is now an ever-present invisible hand that tries to manipulate all of your actions on the internet. This is the hand that is making you act against your own self-interest. Once you recognize it, you see it everywhere, hovering over you, trying to make you click your mouse or press buttons on your smartphone,…

Charles Seife

“In 1933, the Indian Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar realized that the Pauli exclusion principle had only a limited ability to fight against the squeeze of gravity. As pressure in the star increases, the Pauli exclusion principle states that ekectrons inside must move faster and faster to avoid one another. But there's a speed limit: electrons cannot move faster than the speed of…

Charles Seife

“We tend to shy away from data that challenges our assumptions, that erodes our preconceptions. Getting rid of our wrong ideas is a painful and difficult process, yet it's that very process that makes data truly useful. A fact becomes information when it challenges our assumptions. These challenges are the raw material that forces our ideas to evolve, our tastes…

Charles Seife

“Banishing zero also solves the infinity problems in general relativity. If you imagine a black hole as a string, no longer do objects fall through a rip in the fabric of space-time. Instead, a particle loop approaching a black-hole loop stretches out and touches the black hole. The two loops tremble, tear, and form one loop: a slightly more massive…

Charles Seife

“With news and data that is tailored to our prejudices, we deprive ourselves of true information. We wind up wallowing in our own false…

Charles Seife

Image

“Digital information has an unbelievably high R0 [basic reproductive rate], and this means that it's hard to stop once it emerges. It spreads from person to person - even those at a great distance - incredibly quickly, thanks to its high transmissibility and the high interconnectedness of digital society. Once it escapes into the wild, it's all but impossible to…

Charles Seife

“Christianity initially rejected zero, but trade would soon demand it. The man who reintroduced zero to the West was Leonardo of Pisa. The son…

Charles Seife

Image

“Zero dwells at the juxtaposition of quantum mechanics and relativity; zero lives where the two theories meet, and zero causes the two theories to clash. A black hole is a zero in the equations of general relativity; the energy of the vacuum is a zero in the mathematics of quantum theory. The big bang, the most puzzling event in the…

Charles Seife

Explore all 36 Charles Seife quotes

Quote by Charles Seife

Related quotes

More by Charles Seife