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Chaos: Making a New Science QUOTES

Chaos: Making a New Science QUOTES

1 " It’s not an academic question any more to ask what’s going to happen to a cloud. People very much want to know—and that means there’s money available for it. That problem is very much within the realm of physics and it’s a problem very much of the same caliber. You’re looking at something complicated, and the present way of solving it is to try to look at as many points as you can, enough stuff to say where the cloud is, where the warm air is, what its velocity is, and so forth. Then you stick it into the biggest machine you can afford and you try to get an estimate of what it’s going to do next. But this is not very realistic. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

2 " You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

3 " Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

4 " Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person’s mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated—created from connections that were not there before "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

5 " the brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imagination. Some chaos exists out there, and the brain seems to have more flexibility than classical physics in finding the order in it. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

6 " Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

7 " it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

8 " The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

9 " the pattern appears so ethereally, that it is hard to remember that the shape is an attractor. It is not just any trajectory of a dynamical system. It is the trajectory toward which all other trajectories converge. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

10 " The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

11 " The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and the other, in effect, ringing the set at a distance of infinity. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

12 " IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

13 " One simple but powerful consequence of the fractal geometry of surfaces is that surfaces in contact do not touch everywhere. The bumpiness at all scales prevents that. Even in rock under enormous pressure, at some sufficiently small scale it becomes clear that gaps remain, allowing fluid to flow. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

14 " The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little space, no more than about five percent of the body. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

15 " Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

16 " Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

17 " Nature forms patterns. Some are orderly in space but disorderly in time, others orderly in time but disorderly in space. Some patterns are fractal, exhibiting structures self-similar in scale. Others give rise to steady states or oscillating ones. Pattern formation has become a branch of physics and of materials science, allowing scientists to model the aggregation of particles into clusters, the fractured spread of electrical discharges, and the growth of crystals in ice and metal alloys. The dynamics seem so basic—shapes changing in space and time—yet only now are the tools available to understand them. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

18 " Science was constructed against a lot of nonsense, "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

19 " Somehow, after all, as the universe ebbs toward its final equilibrium in the featureless heat bath of maximum entropy, it manages to create interesting structures. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

20 " But unpredictability was not the reason physicists and mathematicians began taking pendulums seriously again in the sixties and seventies. Unpredictability was only the attention-grabber. Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things. That was why scientists played with toys. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science