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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.
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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.
[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.
[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.
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.
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.
In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
— James Gleick
From Chaos (1987), 98.
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
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.
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.
Where chaos begins, classical science stops.
— James Gleick
In Chaos: Making a New Science (1985, 1987), 3
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) -- 
