Quotes About Complexity

The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.

One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.

Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information - is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.

Chess is too difficult to be a game and not serious enough to be a science or an art.

Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.

You cannot know the body by studying the finger, and you cannot understand the universe by learning one science.

It is harder to crack prejudice than an atom.

Economics has been called the dismal science. Once you get to understand it, you may not find it so dismal, but you don't find it much of a science either.

On the question of the world as a whole, science founders. For scientific knowledge the world lies in fragments, the more so the more precise our scientific knowledge becomes.

The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.

The brain has not explained the mind fully.

And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree

A man of true science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.

I used to say: "Everything is Representation Theory". Now I say: "Nothing is Representation Theory".

Anyone who thinks science is trying to make human life easier or more pleasant is utterly mistaken.

But anything that can be called "rigor" is lost exactly where the things become interesting and non trivial.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

Human relationships are not rocket science--the are far, far more complicated

Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous.

Reality is complicated. There is no justification for all of the hasty conclusions.