Quotes About Complexity

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

Complexity is the main enemy of security.

Cryptography by itself is fairly useless. It has to be part of a much larger system.

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

We know that different regions in the brain process shape, colour, and motion. Benoit Mandelbrot has hypothesized that perhaps there is a specific circuit in the brain to deal with fractal complexity.

Self-similarity on all scales is a key factor in understanding and describing nature's phenomena.

Real-world images have redundant information. Tree bark has repeating patterns with small variations.

Zooming into the boundary of the M-set, we find smaller and smaller island molecules, surrounded by increasingly intricate circular patterns, evocative of Oriental art, particularly in the meditative designs of Buddhism known as mandalas.

This is the fundamental characteristic behind the growth of all complex organisms. The same forms recur in many different circumstances, in different materials both organic and inorganic, on a vast range of scales. A small part of our circulatory system looks like the whole. It looks like a tree, like an estuary, like a stream-bed.

Nature finds the same solution to many different problems, like how to drain water from the land into the oceans, and how to get blood from our hearts to our fingertips and back again. And the templates that nature uses are fractals. Clouds look the same at all scales. It is impossible to determine the size of a cloud from a photograph of it.

What we find is highly sensitive dependence to initial conditions, producing phase transitions. Once a critical threshold is passed, the fire spreads outwards, the disease becomes an epidemic, the material magnetic.

The signature of chaos is the fractal attractor-fractals are the patterns of chaos

Period-doubling is a general principle of nature.

Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.

Menschen können nicht kommunizieren, nicht einmal ihre Gehirne können kommunizieren, nicht einmal das Bewußtsein kann kommunizieren. Nur die Kommunikation kann kommunizieren.

Communication is improbable.

Since it has no boundaries, the world is not a system.

No es posible pensar sistemáticamente sin escribir.

Increasingly, people seem to interpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling – the incomprehensible should cause suspicion, not admiration. Possibly this results from the mistaken belief that using a mysterious device confers [extra] power on the user.

Man is such a wondrous being that it is never possible to count up all his merits at once. The more you study him, the more new particulars appear, and their description would be endless.

But yet with all this, although, of course, one may admit this, that and the other, may even... and after all, where aren't there incongruities?

Man is such a wondrous being that it is never possible to count up all his merits at once. The more you study him, the more new particulars appear, and their descriptions would be endless.

The "laughter through tears of sorrow" that Pushkin noted elsewhere in his work is precisely laughter. The images it produces are too deeply ambiguous to bear any social message.

We all know that there are a great many faces in the world, over the carving of which nature has spent no great pains, has used no delicate tools such as files or gimlets, but has simply rough-hewn them with a swing of the arm: one stroke of the axe and there's a nose, another and there are the lips, the eyes are bored with a great drill, and without polishing it off, nature thrusts it into the world, saying, "This will do.