Quotes About Complexity

Quantum theory is of no direct help in understanding the mind.

Within the immense ocean of galaxies and stars we are in a remote corner; amidst the infinite arabesques of forms which constitute reality we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes.

The entropy of a system depends explicitly on blurring. It depends on what I do not register, because it depends on the number of indistinguishable configurations. The same microscopic configuration may be of high entropy with regard to one blurring and of low in relation to another.

Poetry and science are both manifestations of the spirit that creates new ways of thinking the world, in order to understand it better. Great science and great poetry are both visionary, and sometimes may arrive at the same insights. The culture of today that keeps science and poetry so far apart is essentially foolish, to my way of thinking, because it makes us less able to see the complexity and the beauty of the world as revealed by both.

Richard Feynman, who more than anyone has known how to juggle with the theory, has written: "I think I can state that nobody really understands quantum mechanics.

Scientists are not immune from talking nonsense.

Everything is still confused, and there is a very great deal that remains to be understood.

is Entropy, not Energy, that Drives the World

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A small system S does not distinguish the details of the rest of the universe because it interacts only with a few among the variables of the rest of the universe.

It isn't true, as is sometimes stated, that life generates structures that are particularly ordered, or that locally diminish entropy: it is simply a process that degrades and consumes the low entropy of food; it is a self-structured disordering, no more and no less than in the rest of the universe.

Perhaps on closer inspection it is not the [Standard Model] that lacks elegance. Perhaps it is we who have not yet learned to look at it from just the right point of view, one that would reveal its hidden simplicity.

information is the measure of the number of possible alternatives for something.

Time sits at the center of the tangle of problems raised by the intersection of gravity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics.

When we seek a sure foundation on which to base decisions about our actions and thoughts, we find that a sure foundation does not exist. We do not even know whether we actually need such a foundation. We continue to make use of vague, uncertain ideas, precisely in those areas that most deeply concern us. What we call "irrational" is the code name for what we don't understand well about ourselves given the limits of our own intelligence.

information is the measure of the number of possible alternatives for something. For example, if I throw a die, it can land on one of six faces.

entropy, as Boltzmann fully understood, is nothing other than the number of microscopic states that our blurred vision of the world fails to distinguish.

We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this inmense, chaotic universe.

In the big picture of contemporary science, there are many things that we do not understand, and one of the things that we understand least about is ourselves.

Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.

There is not an 'I' and 'the neurons in my brain'. They are the same thing. An individual is a process: complex, tightly integrated.

We are structured to manage precisely this: information; and remain in existence thanks to this.

The nature of man is not his internal structure but the network of personal, familial, and social interactions within which he exists. It is these that "make" us, these that guard us. As humans, we are that which others know of us, that which we know of ourselves, and that which others know about our knowledge. We are complex nodes in a rich web of reciprocal information.

We are complex nodes in a rich web of reciprocal information.