Quotes From "Chaos: Making A New Science" By James Gleick

It’s not an academic question any more to ask what’s going to happen to a cloud. People very much want to know–and that means there’s money available for it. That problem is very much within the realm of physics and it’s a problem very much of the same caliber. You’re looking at something complicated, and the present way of solving it is to try to look at as many points as you can, enough stuff to say where the cloud is, where the warm air is, what its velocity is, and so forth. Then you stick it into the biggest machine you can afford and you try to get an estimate of what it’s going to do next. But this is not very realistic. James Gleick

You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it James Gleick

Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few. James Gleick

Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person’s mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated–created from connections that were not there before James Gleick

The brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imagination. Some chaos exists out there, and the brain seems to have more flexibility than classical physics in finding the order in it. James Gleick

Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world. James Gleick

It struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next. James Gleick

The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things. James Gleick

The pattern appears so ethereally, that it is hard to remember that the shape is an attractor. It is not just any trajectory of a dynamical system. It is the trajectory toward which all other trajectories converge. James Gleick

The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale. James Gleick

The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and the other, in effect, ringing the set at a distance of infinity. James Gleick

IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity. James Gleick

One simple but powerful consequence of the fractal geometry of surfaces is that surfaces in contact do not touch everywhere. The bumpiness at all scales prevents that. Even in rock under enormous pressure, at some sufficiently small scale it becomes clear that gaps remain, allowing fluid to flow. James Gleick

The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little space, no more than about five percent of the body. James Gleick

Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern. James Gleick

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. James Gleick