George Johnson (writer)

George Johnson (born January 20, 1952) is an American science writer and journalist, who writes a column for the New York Times.

Quotes

• While Robert Welch opposed the United Nations for supposedly encouraging obeisance to the one-world conspiracy, McIntire's fundamentalists saw it as a "house of red Babel."
  • Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics. 1983. p. 153. 

• 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.
  • Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order. 1995. p. 269. 

• I shouldn't be fooled, some of his old colleagues told me, by the newer, mellower Murray. As I explored his past, I found that his reputation as an intellectual show-off was well earned. He had long been interested in almost everything—classical history, archaeology, linguistics, wildlife ecology, ornithology, numismatics, French and Chinese cuisine—and he was always ready to lure people into conversations where he could display the depth of his knowledge and, it sometimes seemed, the shallowness of their own. The breadth of his learning had become legendary.
  • Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics. 1999. pp. 9–10. 

• 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.
  • A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer. 2003. p. 9. 

Quotes about Johnson

• George Johnson's Santa Fe office is packed floor to ceiling with century-old electrical paraphernalia — cathode-ray tubes, high-voltage spark coils, glass cylinders of hydrogen and helium, cascades of wires. They're the relics of an eBay odyssey he undertook to re-create a 1909 experiment by Robert Millikan measuring the charge on a single electron.
  • Josie Glausiusz: (24 March 2008)"New Book Celebrates Singular Scientists and Their Beautiful Experiments". Wired Magazine.

• What a chronicler can do, if not share the pain, is observe and ponder and explicate, and Johnson delivers. He busts myths and clarifies realities about what seems to cause, or to help prevent, cancer.
  • David Quammen: (6 September 2013)"Lives of the Cells (book review of Cancer Chronicles by George Johnson)". New York Times.