Quotes About Complexity

Prediction is difficult, especially the future.

Here is something Category-Theorists like: it is trivial, but not trivially trivial.

The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open.

In vertebrate paleontology, increasing knowledge leads to triumphant loss of clarity.

We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.

The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.

The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, 'You haven't answered every question with evolution,'... Well, guess what? Science can't answer every question

We do not know how to formulate string theory nor do we know its underlying principles. Surprisingly, this fact does not stop us from making progress.

[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.

Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.

It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.

We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.

If you aren't confused by quantum mechanics, you haven't really understood it.

Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.

As soon as science has solved one problem, new ones arise. This is the essence of science, and it applies, of course, also to the field of essential oils.

The parts of the universe ... all are connected with each other in such a way that I think it to be impossible to understand any one without the whole.

About weak points [of the Origin] I agree. The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder.

Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase.

Science can't tell you why anything happens.

I remember that mathematicians were telling me in the 1960s that they would recognize computer science as a mature discipline when it had 1,000 deep algorithms. I think we've probably reached 500.

Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.

The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.

Consciousness, like a complex system of software, has thousands of levels of nested, self-accessing subroutines

A calculating engine is one of the most intricate forms of mechanism, a telegraph key one of the simplest. But compare their value.