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.

Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking.

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.

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.

Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool.

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

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.