James Gleick | |
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| Born | August 1, 1954 New York City |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Notable works | Chaos (1987) Genius (1992) The Information (2011) |
| Website | |
| around | |
James Gleick (/ɡlɪk/;[1] born August 1, 1954) is an American author and historian of science whose work has chronicled the cultural impact of modern technology. Recognized for his writing about complex subjects through the techniques of narrative nonfiction, he has been called "one of the great science writers of all time".[2][3] He is part of the inspiration for Jurassic Park character Ian Malcolm.[4]
Gleick's books include the international bestsellers Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011).[5] Three of his books have been Pulitzer Prize[6][7][8] and National Book Award[9][10] finalists; and The Information was awarded the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2012 and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2012. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.[11]
YouTube Encyclopedic
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Information Wants to Have Meaning. Or Does It? James Gleick
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James Gleick on Chaos: Making a New Science
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James Gleick: 2016 National Book Festival
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FULL BOOK - Chaos: Making a New Science
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James Gleick complete video
Transcription
I actually first started thinking about information as a possible glimmer of an idea for a subject for a book when I was working on Chaos, that's when I first heard about it. And it was strange. It was strange to hear about information theory as a scientific subject of study from a bunch of physicists who were working on chaos theory. I mean, they were analyzing a physical system. In fact, it was chaos in water dripping from a tap, the chaos of a dripping faucet. And they were analyzing it in terms of this thing called information theory, as invented by Claude Shannon at Bell Labs in 1948. And I remember thinking there's something magical about that, but also something kind of weird about it. Information is so abstract. We know that there is such a thing as information devoid of meaning, information as an abstract concept of great use, more than great use, of fantastic power for engineers and scientists. For Claude Shannon to create his theory of information, he very explicitly had to announce that he was thinking of information not in the everyday way we use the word, not as news or gossip or anything that was particularly useful, but as something abstract. A string of bits is information, and it doesn't matter whether those string of bits represent something true or false, and for that matter it doesn't matter whether the string of bits represents something meaningful or meaningless. In fact, from the point of view of an electrical engineer who believes in information theory, a string of random bits carries more information than an orderly string of bits, because the orderly string of bits, let's say alternating ones and zeroes, or let's say not quite as orderly, a string of English text, has organization in it and the organization allows you to predict what the next bit in a given message is going to be. And because you can predict it, it's not as surprising. And because it has less surprise, it carries less information. There's one of the sort of paradoxes of information theory, that because information is surprise it's associated with disorder and randomness. All of this is very abstract. It's useful to scientists. It lies in the foundations of the information-based technological world that we all enjoy. But it's also not satisfactory. I think we as humans tend to feel that this view of information as something devoid of meaning is unfriendly. It's hellish. It's scary. It's connected with our sense that we're deluged by a flood of meaningless tweets and blogs and the hall of mirrors sensation of impostors, the false and true intermingling. We may feel that that's what we get when we start to treat information as something that is not necessarily meaningful because as humans what we care about is the meaning.
Life
A native of New York City, Gleick attended Harvard College, where he was an editor of The Harvard Crimson, graduating in 1976 with an A.B. degree in English and linguistics.
He moved to Minneapolis and helped found an alternative weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise a year later, he returned to New York and in 1979 joined the staff of The New York Times. He worked there for ten years as an editor on the metropolitan desk and then as a science reporter.
Among the scientists Gleick profiled in the New York Times Magazine were Douglas Hofstadter, Stephen Jay Gould, Mitchell Feigenbaum, and Benoit Mandelbrot.
His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission.
He wrote the "Fast Forward" column in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999, and his essays charting the growth of the Internet formed the basis of his book What Just Happened.
His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and The Washington Post, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, reported the development of the new science of chaos and complexity. It made the Butterfly Effect a household term, introduced the Mandelbrot Set and fractal geometry to a broad audience, and sparked popular interest in the subject, influencing such diverse writers as Tom Stoppard (Arcadia) and Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park).[12][13]
The Pipeline
As a reaction to poor user experience with procmail configuration at Panix, in 1993 Gleick founded The Pipeline, one of the earliest Internet service providers in New York City.[14] The Pipeline was the first ISP to offer a graphical user interface, incorporating e-mail, chat, Usenet, and the World Wide Web, through software for Windows and Mac operating systems.[15][16]
Gleick and business partner Uday Ivatury licensed the Pipeline software to other Internet service providers in the United States and overseas. In 1995 Gleick sold The Pipeline to PSINet, where it was later absorbed into MindSpring and then EarthLink.[17][18]
Aircraft accident
On 20 December 1997 Gleick was attempting to land his Rutan Long-EZ experimental plane at Greenwood Lake Airport in West Milford, New Jersey, when a build-up of ice in the engine's carburetor caused the aircraft engine to lose power and the plane landed short of the runway into rising terrain.[19] The impact killed Gleick's adopted eight-year-old son, Harry, and left Gleick seriously injured.[20][21]
Work
Gleick's writing style has been described as a combination of "clear mind, magpie-styled research and explanatory verve."[22]
After the publication of Chaos, he collaborated with photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software.
In 1989–90 he was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University.
He was the first editor of The Best American Science Writing series.
His next books included two biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, and Isaac Newton, which John Banville said would "surely stand as the definitive study for a very long time to come."[23]
In 2017 Gleick was elected president of the Authors Guild.
Bibliography
Books
Articles
- James Gleick, "The Fate of Free Will" (review of Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Princeton University Press, 2023, 333 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 1 (18 January 2024), pp. 27–28, 30. "Agency is what distinguishes us from machines. For biological creatures, reason and purpose come from acting in the world and experiencing the consequences. Artificial intelligences – disembodied, strangers to blood, sweat, and tears – have no occasion for that." (p. 30.)
References
- ^ "James Gleick Interview and Reading" on YouTube
- ^ "Study Guide: James Gleick". E Notes.
- ^ Doctorow, Cory (March 24, 2011). "James Gleick's tour-de-force: The Information, a natural history of information theory". Boing Boing. Retrieved 29 May 2014.
- ^ "Chaos Effect in Jurassic Park". study.com. Retrieved 14 February 2022.
- ^ "James Gleick: Bibliography". Amazon.com. Retrieved April 14, 2011.
- ^ Gleick, James. "1988 Finalists". Chaos: Making a new Science. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 28 May 2011.
- ^ Gleick, James. "1993 Finalists". Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 28 May 2011.
- ^ Gleick, James. "2004 Finalists". Isaac Newton. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 28 May 2011.
- ^ Gleick, James. "National Book Awards – 1987". Chaos: Making a New Science. National Book Foundation. Retrieved 28 May 2011.
- ^ Gleick, James. "National Book Awards – 1992". Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. National Book Foundation. Retrieved 28 May 2011.
- ^ Gleick, James (24 November 2010). "About". Bits in the Ether. Author's website. Retrieved 14 June 2011.
- ^ Delaney, Paul (1994). Tom Stoppard in Conversation. University of Michigan Press. p. 224.
- ^ Crichton, Michael (1990). Jurassic Park. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 400.
- ^ Joel Spolsky (April 2000). "Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don't Have Testers".
- ^ Batelle, John (November 1994). "Pipeline". Wired. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
- ^ Michalski, Jerry (January 31, 1994). "Pipeline: Not Just Another Pretty Face" (PDF). Release 1.0. pp. 9–11. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
- ^ Lewis, Peter H. (February 11, 1995). "Performance Systems Buys Pipeline Network". The New York Times. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
- ^ "Psinet to Sell Consumer Internet Division". The New York Times. July 2, 1996. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
- ^ "FA ID: NYC98FA047". National Transportation Safety Board. US Government. Archived from the original on 17 October 2014. Retrieved 12 October 2014.
- ^ "Untitled (NYC98FA047 crash narrative)". National Transportation Safety Board. US Government. Archived from the original on 17 October 2014. Retrieved 12 October 2014.
- ^ Rohde, David (21 December 1997). "Plane Crash Kills Son of Best-Selling Author". The New York Times.
- ^ "Karen Long on James Gleick's The Information". February 7, 2012. Archived from the original on July 30, 2013. Retrieved May 29, 2014.
- ^ Banville, John (August 29, 2003). "The Magus". The Guardian. Retrieved May 29, 2014.
- ^ Dyson, Freeman J. (1992). "Review of Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick". Physics Today. 45 (11): 87. doi:10.1063/1.2809877. ISSN 0031-9228.
- ^ Bass, Thomas A. (November 1, 1992). "Review of Genius by James Gleick". The Los Angeles Times.
- ^ Krantz, Steven G. (December 2003). "Review of Isaac Newton by James Gleick" (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 50 (11): 1404–1406.
- ^ Reisert, Sarah (2017). "It's about Time". Distillations. 3 (2): 46–47.
External links
- James Gleick's website with selections of his work.
- James Gleick, author page in The New York Review of Books.
- A Miracle Made Lyrical, Christopher Lydon interview with James Gleick.
- The Narrative Thread, James Gleick talks with Robert Birnbaum on Identity Theory (webzine).
- Leave Cyberspace, Meet in Egypt, article on the culture of Wikipedia.
- Audio: James Gleick in conversation with Janna Levin at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2008.
- 'Science writer James Gleick explains the physics that define new media in the ongoing communications revolution' by Peter Kadzis, interview in the Boston Phoenix, April 6, 2011.
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Time Travel.
- Gleick on Mastodon
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This page was last edited on 5 April 2024, at 18:14