Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butter- fly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.

I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.

It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

"Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote. ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.