Sublime

I came into the room which was half dark, and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience and realized that I was in for trouble at the last part of my speech dealing with the age of the earth, where my views conflicted with his. To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye an

Wiener was as worldly as Shannon was reticent. He was well traveled and polyglot, ambitious and socially aware; he took science personally and passionately. His expression of the second law of thermodynamics, for example, was a cry of the heart: We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to

Physics basically says we’ll understand the universe because we’re going to extremize a function. That’s what physics does—optimization, some least-action principles. So, we’re going to minimize the time, we’ll minimize the energy, we’ll minimize the distance. We’re looking for those functions that we’re trying to extremize and we’re going to repre