We don't know what energy is, any more than we know what information is, but as a now robust scientific concept we can describe it in precise mathematical terms, and as a commodity we can measure, market, regulate and tax it.

As every bookie knows instinctively, a number such as reliability - a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure - is needed to make the valuation of information practically useful.

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 smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information.

Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense.

Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain.

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.