James Gleick Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances. Chaos: Making a New Science

2. By contrast, a twentieth-century fluid dynamicist could hardly expect to advance knowledge in his field without first adopting a body of terminology and mathematical technique. In return, unconsciously, he would give up much freedom to question the foundations of his science. Chaos: Making a New Science

3. Chaos has become not just theory but also method, not just a canon of beliefs but also a way of doing science. Chaos: Making a New Science

4. Had he stopped with the Butterfly Effect, an image of predictability giving way to pure randomness, then Lorenz would have produced no more than a piece of very bad news. But Lorenz saw more than randomness embedded in his weather model. He saw a fine geometrical structure, order masquerading as randomness. Chaos: Making a New Science

5. He had discovered a great truth of nature. He had proved it and been disputed. He had tried to show how science is grounded in concrete practice rather than grand theories. In chasing a shadow, he felt, he had sacrificed his tranquillity. Isaac Newton

6. Implicitly, the mission of many twentieth-century scientists — biologists, neurologists, economists — has been to break their universes down into the simplest atoms that will obey scientific rules. Chaos: Making a New Science

7. In daily life, theLorenzian quality of sensitive dependence on initial conditions lurkseverywhere. A man leaves the house in the morning thirty seconds late, aflowerpot misses his head by a few millimeters, and then he is run over by atruck. Or, less dramatically, he misses a bus that runs every ten minutes—hisconnection to a train that runs every hour. Small perturbations in one’s dailytrajectory can have large consequences. A batter facing a pitched ball knows thatapproximately the same swing will not give approximately the same result,baseball being a game of inches. Science, though—science was different. Chaos: Making a New Science

8. In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large. Chaos: Making a New Science

9. Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules. [...] Analyzing the behavior of a nonlinear equation like the Navier-Stokes equation is like walking through a maze whose walls rearrange themselves with each step you take. Chaos: Making a New Science

10. Not by accident, he made scientists seem less than perfect rationalists. Chaos: Making a New Science

11. Revolutions do not come piecemeal. One account of nature replaces another. Chaos: Making a New Science

12. Some carry out their work explicitly denying that it is a revolution; others deliberately use Kuhn’s language of paradigm shifts to describe the changes they witness. Chaos: Making a New Science

13. That was acceptable, his father told him: you can always try to solve a problem by proving that no solution exists. Chaos: Making a New Science

14. The Butterfly Effect was no accident; it was necessary. Chaos: Making a New Science

15. The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe. Chaos: Making a New Science

16. The repetitions were never quite exact. There was pattern, with disturbances. An orderly disorder. Chaos: Making a New Science