George Johnson Quotes

United States, Journalist
January 20, 1952

George Johnson is an American journalist and science writer. Johnson is the author of nine books, including The Cancer Chronicles , The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments and Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics , and writes for a number of publications, including The New York Times. He is a two-time winner of the science journalism award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His books have been short-listed three times for the Royal Society science book prize. His column, "Raw Data", appears in The New York Times.

The weapons laboratory of Los Alamos stands as a reminder that our very power as pattern finders can work against us, that it is possible to discern enough of the universe's underlying order to tap energy so powerful that it can destroy its discoverers or slowly poison them with its waste.

George Johnson
Imagine the traffic jam you've got. We're talking about several miles of debris going down the interstates.

George Johnson
- States
- Jam
- Debris

Build a quantum computer and problems long dismissed as hopeless would melt away. Imagine tapping a fundamental force of nature, not for the purpose of moving around matter but for moving around numbers—explosions of information. Quantum computing would be to ordinary computing what nuclear energy is to fire.

George Johnson
Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other.

George Johnson
News is becoming more of a conversation. You can express opinions online in real time. You don't send a letter to the editor and wait a week.

George Johnson
Whenever you read a book or have a conversation, the experience causes physical changes in your brain. It's a little frightening to think that every time you walk away from an encounter, your brain has been altered, sometimes permanently.

George Johnson
Even if you invoke vast geologic time, the series of fortuitous mutations leading to an eye, a kidney, or a brain seem too good to be true.

George Johnson
- Time
- True
- Mutations
Try as we might, we will never succeed in squeezing the immensity of creation into our tiny heads.

George Johnson
- Creation
- Heads
- Squeezing