It came from the world’s first computer – the Mark 1 – a room-size maze of electromechanical circuits built in 1944 in a lab at Harvard University. The computer developed a glitch one day, and no one was able to locate the cause. After hours of searching, a lab assistant finally spotted the problem. It seemed a moth had landed on one of the computer’s circuit boards and shorted it out. From that moment on, computer glitches were referred to as bugs.
They will prove nothing except that we viewers will watch anything if it’s sufficiently hyped.
Uncertainty is always a precursor to sweeping change; transformation is always preceded by upheaval and fear. I urge you to place your faith in the human capacity for creativity and love, because these two forces, when combined, possess the power to illuminate any darkness.
The appeal of modern art remained a mystery to him.
Scientists and spiritualists often use different vocabularies to describe the exact same mysteries of the universe. The conflicts are frequently over semantics, not substance. – Robert Langdon.
Nicolaus Copernicus was the father of the heliocentric model – the belief that the planets revolve around the sun – which ignited a scientific revolution in the 1500s that entirely obliterated the Church’s long-held teaching that mankind occupied the center of God’s universe. His discovery was condemned by the Church for three centuries, but the damage had been.
When a computer creates art, who is the artist – the computer or the programmer?
Even respected science channels were doing it, asking their viewers: “Is It Possible That This Temple in Peru Was Built by Ancient Aliens?
You’re telling me that CERN dug out millions of tons of earth just to smash tiny particles?
The early Greeks had to look back centuries to study ancient culture, but we need look back only a single generation to find those who lived without the technologies we take for granted today.
However, when they try to look back to the instant when the Big Bang occurred – where T equals zero – the mathematics all goes mad, describing what seems to be a mystical speck of infinite heat and infinite density.
I know you want to run, but I’m not going to let you. Sooner or later you need to start trusting someone.
Langdon always ended this lecture with a reminder that Arab culture had also given mankind the word al-kuhl – the favorite beverage of Harvard freshmen – known as alcohol.
Newton’s third life childrearing colin for every lunacy, there is an equal and opposite lunacy. – Edmond Kirsch.
A pattern is any distinctly organized sequence. Patterns occur everywhere in nature – the spiraling seeds of a sunflower, the hexagonal cells of a honeycomb, the circular ripples on a pond when a fish jumps, et cetera.” “Okay. And codes?” “Codes are special,” Langdon said, his tone rising. “Codes, by definition, must carry information. They must do more than simply form a pattern – codes must transmit data and convey meaning.
The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.
The age of religion is drawing to a close, and the age of science is dawning.
Inferno is the underworld as described in Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy, which portrays hell as an elaborately structured realm populated by entities known as “shades” – bodiless souls trapped between life and death.
The Bridge of Sighs, he thought, recalling one of his favorite boyhood movies, A Little Romance, which was based on the legend that if two young lovers kissed beneath this bridge at sunset while the bells of St. Mark’s were ringing, they would love each other forever. The.
Sophie stopped the taxi at an imposing gate that blocked the bank’s driveway – a cement-lined ramp that descended beneath the building. A video camera overhead was aimed directly at them, and Langdon had the feeling that this camera, unlike those at the Louvre, was authentic. Sophie rolled down the window and surveyed the electronic podium on the driver’s side. An LCD screen provided directions in seven languages. Topping the list was English.