Sublime

Astronomers are building a new array of radio telescopes that will generate an exabyte of data per day (an exabyte is a quintillion bytes; a byte is a single value, an integer between 0 and 255, often representing a single letter, digit, or punctuation mark).

Thus in refuting the determinist philosophy behind the mathematics of Newton and the imperial logic of Hilbert, he opened the way to a new mathematics, the mathematics of information.8 From this demarche emerged a new industry of computers and communications currently led by Google and informed by a new mathematics of creativity and surprise.

The history of science is often circuitous, ironic, and harsh. Ideas are discovered, lost, and rediscovered. Paradigms treated as bedrock for generations are overturned, sometimes overnight, often by observations of such apparent simplicity that they’re overlooked by even a field’s most thoughtful luminaries—setting the stage for an outsider to cha

life performs computation near optimal thermodynamic efficiency—

Traditionally, science seeks order by understanding the simplest parts of a system. How does a single gas particle behave given a certain temperature? Which gene in our DNA determines eye color? Scientists then try to develop theories that explain more general observations based on their detailed understanding of the individual parts.