If you don't understand something, break it apart; reduce it to its components. Since they are simpler than the whole,you have a much better chance of understanding them; and when you have succeeded in doing that, put the whole thing back together again.

The switch from 'steam engines' to 'heat engines' signals the transition from engineering practice to theoretical science.

In order to understand information, we must define it; bit in order to define it, we must first understand it. Where to start?

If you don't understand something, break it apart; reduce it to its components. Since they are simpler than the whole,you have a much better chance of understanding them; and when you have succeeded in doing that, put the whole thing back together again.

For generations, field guides to plants and animals have sharpened the pleasure of seeing by opening our minds to understanding. Now John Adam has filled a gap in that venerable genre with his painstaking but simple mathematical descriptions of familiar, mundane physical phenomena. This is nothing less than a mathematical field guide to inanimate nature.

This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for.

If quantum communication and quantum computation are to flourish, a new information theory will have to be developed.