Chaos: Making a New Science Quotes

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

Chaos: Making a New Science

You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it

Chaos: Making a New Science

Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

Chaos: Making a New Science

The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and the other, in effect, ringing the set at a distance of infinity.

Chaos: Making a New Science

it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.

Chaos: Making a New Science

Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person’s mind from childhood, information is clearly not just...

Chaos: Making a New Science

IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

Chaos: Making a New Science

The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.

Chaos: Making a New Science

One simple but powerful consequence of the fractal geometry of surfaces is that surfaces in contact do not touch everywhere. The bumpiness at all scales prevents that. Even in rock under enormous pressure, at some sufficiently small scale it becomes ...

Chaos: Making a New Science

the brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imaginati...

Chaos: Making a New Science

the pattern appears so ethereally, that it is hard to remember that the shape is an attractor. It is not just any trajectory of a dynamical system. It is the trajectory toward which all other trajectories converge.

Chaos: Making a New Science

Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.

Chaos: Making a New Science

The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.

Chaos: Making a New Science

The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little space, no more than about five percent of the body.

Chaos: Making a New Science

Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.

Chaos: Making a New Science