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1 " The concept of randomness and coincidence will be obsolete when people can finally define a formulation of patterned interaction between all things within the universe. "
― Toba Beta , Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
2 " His Presbyterian minster father had believed in a divine design, and Mozasu believed that life was like this game where the player could adjust the dials yet also expect the uncertainty of factors he couldn't control. He understood why his customers wanted to play something that looked fixed but which also left room for randomness and hope. "
― Lee Min-jin , Pachinko
3 " Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all. "
― Wally Lamb
4 " My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical. "
― Richard Dawkins , The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
5 " Even if a particle could travel backward in time, information could not. Retrocausality will be replaced by something more sophisticated. There are no perfect symmetries, there is no pure randomness everything is an approximation of something else. Information may appear in a digital form but meaning never does. Spacetime is built up from approximations, not discrete ones and zeros, and the only constant may be ratios. Quantum entanglement and geometry; if we think of a particle as being at one pole of an expanding sphere that is not perfectly symmetrical, this surface would be " rippling" like the surface of the ocean (in the audio world this is called dithering), at the other pole is the entangled particle's pair and it is a property of the sphere that gives the illusion of connectivity. This is not a physical geometry, it is a computational geometry. Is spacetime a product of entanglement? Renate Loll believes that time is not perfectly symmetrical. Her computer models require causality. Possibly some form of quantum random walk in state space. If a photon is emitted by an electron inside of a clock on Earth and it travels to a clock four light years away, time stops for the clock on Earth and time jumps forward eight years for the distant clock also, the electron that will capture the photon becomes infinitely large relative to the photon but the electron that emitted it does not become infinitely small therefore, time is not perfectly symmetrical. "
6 " Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace. "
― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
7 " One of the most curious consequences of quantum physics is that a particle like an electron can seemingly be in more than one place at the same time until it is observed, at which point there seems to be a random choice made about where the particle is really located. Scientists currently believe that this randomness is genuine, not just caused by a lack of information. Repeat the experiment under the same conditions and you may get a different answer each time. "
― Marcus du Sautoy , What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge
8 " Two moral forces shaped how we think and live in this shining twentieth century: the Virgin, and the Dynamo. The Dynamo represents the desire to know; the Virgin represents the freedom not to know.What's the Virgin made of? Things that we think are silly, mostly. The peculiar logic of dreams, or the inexplicable stirring we feel when we look on someone that's beautiful not in a way that we all agree is beautiful, but the unique way in which a single person is. The Virgin is faith and mysticism; miracle and instinct; art and randomness.On the other hand, you have the Dynamo: the unstoppable engine. It finds the logic behind a seeming miracle and explains that miracle away; it finds the order in randomness to which we're blind; it takes the caliper to a young woman's head and quantifies her beauty in terms of pleasing mathematical ratios; it accounts for the secret stirring you felt by discoursing at length on the nervous systems of animals. "
― Dexter Palmer , The Dream of Perpetual Motion
9 " He said that the principal function of music was to organize the details into harmonies that were intended to make us forget that there was randomness all around us. The same, he said, could be said for great books. "
― Selden Edwards
10 " I notice I am taking risks with my own security and losing my sensitivity to danger. I don't know it at the time, but the effects of war are reaching into me in unexpected ways, and I am being changed by them. I am surrounded by destruction and the randomness of death, which I cannot fathom. I have felt the closeness of death as tangibly as the whisper of a murderous seducer, and felt the richness, twinged by guilt, of having escaped its grasp. I have seen too often the numb lost look of men consumed by undiluted grief, and heard the howl of children as their mothers are pulled from the rubble of a rocket-blasted home, and I am coming to understand the long dark pain of those who silently endure what first seems unendurable. "
― Jason Elliot , The Network
11 " But should not atheists have an equal obligation to explain the origin of pleasure in a world of randomness and meaninglessness? "
― Philip Yancey , Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church
12 " The two go hand in hand like a dance: chance flirts with necessity, randomness with determinism. To be sure, it is from this interchange that novelty and creativity arise in Nature, thereby yielding unique forms and novel structures. "
― , Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos
13 " ... Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism... "
14 " Conventional wisdom nor scientific, mathematical prove of randomness in life could do nothing to deter human's curiosity for the unknown, however small the chance of a positive outcome maybe. "
― Vann Chow , The Pachinko Girl (Tokyo Faces #1)
15 " The transitory and random quality of emotions (“Well, that’s just the way I feel about it”) is deeply connected to, and largely the cause of, random engagement of one’s values and priorities. This very randomness and inconsistency is actually the cause of deeper suffering, primarily through the accumulation of addictions and the indulgence in reactions that are disproportionately small in comparison to what is really being sacrificed for them. Curiously—and a major theme in my own work over decades—the casual association of emotions to love is part of the insanity in all this. "
― Darrell Calkins , Re:
16 " Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature. "
― Eric Hoffer
17 " According to the scientist, time is interminable and inexhaustible. The artist is more inclined to relate the passage of time as a subject involving the randomness of memory and humankind’s ability to create vivid recollections. Astute artists depict collections of disjointed thought fragments in paintings and literature in order to stir the pot of human consciousness. Art rests upon the correspondence between the impact of external experience and the finiteness of human life. An artist attempts to articulate answers to the mystery of being by rendering a thoughtful interpretation of the world that we occupy and experience through our senses. "
― , Dead Toad Scrolls
18 " Then there is the cosmologist, who views himself as nothing but a manipulation of atoms; his mind configured out of randomness into the tool a vast, blind universe might use to perceive itself. If this is so then truly " all is vanity" . What could be more pleasing to the cosmic narcissist than to gaze eternally with a billion eyes into the mirror that is himself? What fault, however, if certain eyes ultimately don’t like what they see? "
19 " The problem with life—with a lot of things—was randomness was responsible for so many things. "
― Andrea Speed , Freefall (Infected #4)
20 " Where had they all gone to, he often pondered; those threads he had once held together, how far had they scattered, some to break, others to weave into unknown patterns? The strange randomness of the world beguiled him, that randomness which never would, so long as the world lasted, give meaning to those choruses again. "
― James Hilton , Good-Bye, Mr. Chips