5,882 quotes found
“The fundamental problem about trying to define life... If you go to a physics department... you'll be given a definition in terms of matter... force... energy... entropy... free energy, molecular b...”
“[B]iologists... define life in terms of its informational qualities... physicists tend to define life in terms of the physical qualities.”
“[I]nformation pervades biology. Your DNA is chock full of encrypted information, and the encryption is really important. But genes don't act in isolation. They couple together to form networks, som...”
“[A]nts... have... collective decision-making... a labyrinth of [network] information exchange... which can profoundly affect the outcome of the colony. We see it... in bird flocking.”
“Perhaps the most exquisite example of information in biology... During embryogenesis there's the most meticulous choreography of organized information, so all the right bits end up in the right pla...”
“[T]hat great information processing system between our ears... probably ...the grandest example we know of... in the universe.”
“This web of information extends beyond individual organisms and communities of organisms to a planetary scale. ...Andrew Kim and Harrison Smith... looked at over 28,000 genomes and... produced this...”
“Paul Nurse ...in his visionary essay ...Life, Logic and Information extols the virtues of thinking in an information, web-based way about life, and how, instead of worrying... about... the molecula...”
“[W]ith the physics of living matter, have we joined... the world of physics with the world of informational biology?”
“[I]nformation... has been in physics for a long time, in the most obvious way with Maxwell's demon... It was... just a Gedanken-Experiment... in 1867, but just in recent years, engineers (nanotechn...”
“[T]he demon... is transferring heat from a colder region to a warmer region in apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. ...[A] refrigerator... costs energy to run... but the demon is ...”
“So in effect, information serves as a fuel, and this leads to the whole concept of information engines. Engines that will run on information power...”
“A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.”
“India has been very lucky in the Nehru family. Nehru was unique in recent world history: a colonial protest figure, a folk hero who did not appeal to fanaticism but was a reasonable, reasoning man....”
“Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.”
“One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas — and you have to work through it all.”
“One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.”
“To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in ...”
“What is happening in India is a mighty creative process.... But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening. Deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging to their historical humil...”
“What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And — though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall...”
