Quotes About Complexity

We, the garden of technology. We, undecidable.

Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.

Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.

Technology frightens me to death. It's designed by engineers to impress other engineers. And they always come with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other engineers — which is why almost no technology ever works.

An edifice is more than a house and less than a City, though it may resemble a house from the outside and a city from within. From without, an edifice may seem self-contained and finite; from within, it may well extend beyond lines of vision, both spatially and temporally. In almost every possible way, edifices manifest a principle central to the description of most physical structures in fantasy: there is always more to them than meets the eye.

borderline simpleton.

He was a locked box inside which tempests roiled. He was a man enshadowed by himself.

There is more than one history of the world.

Sometimes the snake's-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.

I think we are Somehow dealing not with a man but with a geography.

Any time you stop looking at evil as a black and white thing, it's helpful. So the fact that there won't be any obligatory Islamic terrorist stereotypes in movies any more, that'd be helpful.

There is no formula that can deliver all truth, all harmony, all simplicity. No Theory of Everything can ever provide total insight. For, to see through everything, would leave us seeing nothing at all.

the values of the constants of Nature are rather bio-friendly. If they are changed by even a small amount the world becomes lifeless and barren instead of a home for interesting complexity

Each of us is a complicated assymetrical outcome of the laws of electromagnetism and gravity.

Our brains are the most complicated objects that we have so far encountered in the Universe. We are far from simple. Indeed, were our brains significantly simpler, we would be too simple to know it.

We have seen that the process of stellar alchemy takes time – billions of years of it. And because our Universe is expanding it needs to be billions of light years in size if it is to have enough time to produce the building blocks for living complexity. A universe that was only as big as our Milky Way galaxy, with its 100 billion stars, would be little more than a month old.

Another consequence of an old expanding universe, besides its large size, is that it is cold, dark and lonely. When any ball of gas or radiation is expanded in volume, the temperature of its constituents falls off in proportion to the increase in its size. A universe that is big and old enough to contain the building blocks of complexity will be very cold and the levels of average radiant energy so low that space will everywhere appear dark.

Life as we know, and partially understand it, is a classical example of what can occur when a sufficient level of complexity is attained. Consciousness appears to be a manifestation of an even more elaborate level of organization.

Any string of symbols that can be given an abbreviated representation is called algorithmically compressible.

A condition, like the existence of stars or certain chemical elements, is identified as a necessary condition for the existence of any form of chemical complexity, of which life is the most impressive known example. This does not mean that if this condition is met that life must exist, will never die out if it does exist, or that the fact that this condition holds in our Universe means that it was 'designed' with life in mind.

by means of evolution by natural selection, which showed how living things can become well adapted to their environments over the course of time under a very wide range of circumstances, so long as the environment is not changing too quickly. Complexity could develop from simplicity without direct Divine intervention.

Postmodernism thus is not relativism or skepticism, as its uncomprehending critics almost daily charge, but minutely close attention to detail, a sense for the complexity and multiplicity of things, for close readings, for detailed histories, for sensitivity to differences. The postmodernists think the devil is in the details, but they also have reason to hope that none of this will antagonize God.

From the very beginning of the movement in the sixteenth century, Anabaptists shared a deep suspicion of the so-called Schriftgelehrten - the university-trained scholars who, they claimed artfully dodged the clear and simple teachings of Jesus by appealing to complex arguments and carefully crafted statements of doctrine. In other words, they confused theological discussions with lived faith.

I tell you, with complex numbers you can do anything.