Quotes About Lorenz

Scientific truth is universal, because it is only discovered by the human brain and not made by it, as art is.

We seek ecological validity in our studies and follow the advice of Uexküll, Lorenz, and Imanishi, who encouraged human empathy as a way to understand other species. True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are.

Not unlike Lorenz's emphasis on knowing the whole animal, Imanishi urged us to empathize with the species under study. We need to get under its skin, he said, or as we would nowadays put it, try to enter its Umwelt.

Lorenz was the charismatic, flamboyant thinker—he didn't conduct a single statistical analysis in his life—while Tinbergen did the nitty-gritty of actual data collection.

In 1972, the seagull was deposed when a conference organizer, unable to check back about what Lorenz wanted to call an upcoming talk, wrote his own title that switched the metaphor to a butterfly.)

Konrad Lorenz, who won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work on the organization of social behavior in animals, often spoke of his Greylag geese "falling in love." Occasionally, his colleagues took him to task for being anthropomorphic, and he would reply, "It is the accurate term for a real phenomenon for which there is no other name. I consider the term appropriate to any species, if that is in fact what they do.

Had he stopped with the Butterfly Effect, an image of predictability giving way to pure randomness, then Lorenz would have produced no more than a piece of very bad news. But Lorenz saw more than randomness embedded in his weather model. He saw a fine geometrical structure, order masquerading as randomness.

An attractor like Lorenz's illustrated the stability and the hidden structure of a system that otherwise seemed patternless, but how did this peculiar double spiral help researchers exploring unrelated systems? No one knew.

A particular kind of fluid motion inspired Lorenz's three equations: the rising of hot gas or liquid, known as convection.