Quotes About Complexity

But most of them must have the wit to understand that phenomena like these are maddeningly unstable, and that there's no telling what weird, seemingly inconsequential event might cause the system to shift into a radically different configuration.

I wanted to shout: one Far Side on the door does not an interesting person make.

Next was a castle divided into many small rooms, with a system for passing messages between rooms through a pneumatic tube. In each room was a group of people who responded to the messages by following certain rules laid out in books, which usually entailed sending more messages to other rooms. After

Religion is not for simpletons.

Cruft is forever. If you peel back the layers that have grown on top of other layers, and keep delving, and grep deep enough, you're going to find base code that was written by some Linux geek in the 1980s or something. File system primitives. Memory allocation routines that were made to run on hacked single-core IBM PCs that had never heard of the Internet.

The world is full of contradictions, My son. Lack of contradictions is not a necessary ingredient in truth. Sometimes greater truth lies within the contradiction. What we have here is Divine Dichotomy.

Sometimes I wish I had an easy answer for why I'm depressed.

You like simple." "Doesn't everybody?" "Some people thrive on complexity, Craig.

Down there between our legs, it's like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?

Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee's. To such a species, our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door.

The universe has never made one of anything, so why would there even be one of itself?

There's no doubt about it: more varieties of carbon-based molecules exist than all other kinds of molecules combined.

What are the chances that this first and only smart species in the history of life on Earth has enough smarts to completely figure out how the universe works? Chimpanzees

dark matter is our frenemy.

Human nature scares the hell out of me.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!" One thing quarks do have going for them: all their names are simple—something chemists, biologists, and especially geologists seem incapable of achieving when naming their own stuff.

To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place.

Astrobiologists now believe that the existence of life throughout the universe requires: 1. a source of energy; 2. a type of atom that allows complex structures to exist; 3. a liquid solvent in which molecules can float and interact; and 4. sufficient time for life to arise and to evolve.

One thing quarks do have going for them: all their names are simple—something chemists, biologists, and especially geologists seem incapable of achieving when naming their own stuff.

In life, lots of things occupy two or more classifications

While there, I came to resent labels of all kinds. What are they, if not intellectually lazy ways of asserting you know everything about a person you've never met?

?wiat nie ma obowi?zku by? dla ciebie zrozumia?ym.

The person who is too smart to love is truly an idiot.

It's odd how relationships work like that: Love is not an accident. It is a delicate union of two complex, complementary puzzle pieces that have inadvertently been created by different manufacturers.