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Who said: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
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Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index G > James Gleick Quotes

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James Gleick
(1 Aug 1954 - )

American science writer and journalist whose first book, Chaos was a surprise best-seller, followed by biographies of Richard Feynmand and Isaac Newton.

Science Quotes by James Gleick (10 quotes)


“Half genius and half buffoon,” Freeman Dyson ... wrote. ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American—unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.
— James Gleick
In Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992), Prologue, 4.
Science quotes on:  |  Bedrock (3)  |  Buffoon (3)  |  Burning (49)  |  Freeman Dyson (55)  |  Energy (373)  |  Richard P. Feynman (125)  |  Friend (180)  |  Genius (301)  |  Modern (402)  |  Modern Science (55)  |  New (1273)  |  Obsession (13)  |  Physical (518)  |  Realize (157)  |  Tunnel (13)

[Richard Feynman] believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing. The alternative to uncertainty is authority, against which science has fought for centuries.
— James Gleick
In Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992), 371-372.
Science quotes on:  |  Ability (162)  |  Against (332)  |  Alternative (32)  |  Authority (99)  |  Belief (615)  |  Blemish (2)  |  Century (319)  |  Doubt (314)  |  Essence (85)  |  Richard P. Feynman (125)  |  Fight (49)  |  Know (1538)  |  Knowing (137)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Primacy (3)  |  Uncertainty (58)

[The tools that Newton gave us] entered the marrow of what we know without knowing how we know it.
— James Gleick
From Isaac Newton (2003), 188.
Science quotes on:  |  Enter (145)  |  Know (1538)  |  Knowing (137)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Tool (129)

Astrophysicists closing in on the grand structure of matter and emptiness in the universe are ruling out the meatball theory, challenging the soap bubble theory, and putting forward what may be the strongest theory of all: that the cosmos is organized like a sponge.
— James Gleick
'Rethinking Clumps and Voids in the Universe', New York Times (9 Nov 1986), A1.
Science quotes on:  |  Astrophysicist (7)  |  Bubble (23)  |  Challenge (91)  |  Cosmos (64)  |  Emptiness (13)  |  Forward (104)  |  Matter (821)  |  Organized (9)  |  Sponge (9)  |  Strong (182)  |  Strongest (38)  |  Structure (365)  |  Theory (1015)  |  Universe (900)

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.
— James Gleick
In Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992), 324.
Science quotes on:  |  Already (226)  |  Create (245)  |  Creativity (84)  |  Essence (85)  |  Richard P. Feynman (125)  |  Imagination (349)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Known (453)  |  Match (30)  |  Must (1525)  |  Painful (12)  |  Powerful (145)  |  Reality (274)  |  Rule (307)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Straitjacket (2)

In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
— James Gleick
From Chaos (1987), 98.
Science quotes on:  |  Eye (440)  |  Fractal (11)  |  Infinity (96)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Seeing (143)  |  Way (1214)

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.
— James Gleick
From transcript for video interview on bigthink website
Science quotes on:  |  Ability (162)  |  Change (639)  |  Clock (51)  |  Daylight (23)  |  Daylight Saving Time (10)  |  Due (143)  |  Human (1512)  |  New (1273)  |  Place (192)  |  Possible (560)  |  Sense (785)  |  Simultaneity (3)  |  Standard (64)  |  Telegraph (45)  |  Time (1911)  |  Understanding (527)  |  Way (1214)  |  Whatever (234)  |  Wherever (51)  |  World (1850)  |  Zone (5)

Over very long time scales, when the perturbing influences of both Jupiter and Saturn are taken into account, the seemingly regular orbits of asteroids that stray into the Kirkwood gaps turn chaotic. For millions of years … such an orbit seems predictable. Then the path grows increasingly eccentric until it begins to cross the orbit of Mars and then the Earth. Collisions or close encounters with those planets are inevitable.
— James Gleick
In article 'Tales of Chaos: Tumbling Moons and Unstable Asteroids", New York Times (20 Jan 1987), C3.
Science quotes on:  |  Account (195)  |  Asteroid (19)  |  Begin (275)  |  Both (496)  |  Chaos (99)  |  Collision (16)  |  Cross (20)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Eccentric (11)  |  Gap (36)  |  Grow (247)  |  Inevitable (53)  |  Influence (231)  |  Jupiter (28)  |  Long (778)  |  Mars (47)  |  Million (124)  |  Orbit (85)  |  Path (159)  |  Perturb (2)  |  Planet (402)  |  Predictable (10)  |  Regular (48)  |  Saturn (15)  |  Scale (122)  |  Seemingly (28)  |  Stray (7)  |  Time (1911)  |  Turn (454)  |  Year (963)

The world makes a messy laboratory for ecologists, a cauldron of five million interacting species. Or is it fifty million? Ecologists do not actually know.
— James Gleick
In Chaos: Making a New Science (1985, 1987), 59.
Science quotes on:  |  Do (1905)  |  Ecologist (9)  |  Interact (8)  |  Know (1538)  |  Laboratory (214)  |  Messy (6)  |  Million (124)  |  Species (435)  |  World (1850)

Where chaos begins, classical science stops.
— James Gleick
In Chaos: Making a New Science (1985, 1987), 3
Science quotes on:  |  Begin (275)  |  Chaos (99)  |  Classical (49)  |  Stop (89)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
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Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
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Isaac Asimov
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