Ubiquity Quotes

“Science” means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature. —PAUL VALÉRY1”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“Year after year, economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data without in any way being able to advance, in any perceptible way, a systematic understanding of the structure and the operation of a real economic system. —WASSILY LEONTIEF1”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“At this critical point, the factions of magnets come in all sizes, ranging from single isolated magnets up to huge clumps that stretch across the entire magnet. If we added more magnets to make an array as big as the United States, the same thing would happen. The factions would range from tiny clumps to massive blobs stretching from New York to Los Angeles. As we know, the geometric regularity of any power law implies a lack of any typical scale—a feature that shows up clearly in the critical point image. But one picture really can’t do justice to the character of the critical state, which is forever changing. If you were to take snapshots at different moments, you would see the alliances of the factions constantly shifting, with some dissolving and others forming up. The critical state is subject to tremendous fluctuations, and always remains poised on the very edge of sudden, radical change. To call it “hypersensitive” would be an understatement. Since the army of arrows is balanced on the precipice between its two phases, always on the verge of falling into line, even the tiniest influence can push it over the edge. Just a single magnet flipping over can trigger an avalanche of further flippings that would rampage from one side to the other.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“The story, then, seems rather simple: when iron is cold, the forces of order win out; when hot, the battle goes the other way and chaos rules. But this leaves out the juiciest detail. At some intermediate temperature, the forces of order and chaos must fight to a stalemate. This is the critical point, and in iron, it occurs at 770 degrees Celsius. What happens to the army of arrows at this point? What does it mean for something to be neither organized nor disorganized, but somehow perched on the delicate boundary between the two? The answers to these questions are rather more elusive.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“We live today in a world in which poets and historians and men of affairs are proud that they wouldn’t even begin to consider thinking about learning anything of science, regarding it as the far end of a tunnel too long for any wise man to put his head into. —J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER1”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“Indeed, there are deep theoretical arguments showing that it is often valid to be reckless with the details, and that the workings of outrageously oversimplified games really can offer legitimate explanations of very complicated things. The basic idea goes by the name critical-state universality, and it represents one of the most profound discoveries in theoretical physics in the twentieth century.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“Are there any good reasons to expect that simple games can capture the essence of freezing, let alone of earthquakes, forest fires, and mass extinctions? It is fair to point out that Bak and Tang’s initial paper describing their earthquake game touched off a storm of criticism. Many geophysicists have spent their careers studying specific earthquake zones and fault systems in painstaking detail in an effort to understand earthquakes. To them, this slapdash mathematical approach seemed almost insulting, and served only to confirm about theoretical physicists what the biologist Francis Crick once said about mathematicians. “In my experience,” he concluded, “most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers.”10 After all, here were a handful of theorists who never took a first university course in Earth science, and who were nonetheless claiming that they could explain earthquakes with a toy model that includes almost nothing of the complex detail of the physical setting in which real earthquakes occur.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“These individual extinctions, you might suppose, take place because of changes in the climate, the overzealous feeding of some predators, and so on. It doesn’t really matter; biologists know that isolated extinctions can happen for all kinds of reasons. The important thing in the Amaral-Meyer game is what happens next. When a species on the lowest level goes extinct, this affects species on the level above. Some of these higher species may find that all the species on which they normally feed have vanished. In this case, the higher-level species will then also go extinct. This effect can ripple up the ladder, since higher species may also find that all their food sources have gone extinct.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“If such a positive feedback loop should ever arise in a collection of molecules, the concentrations of all members of the autocatalytic set would take off. Kauffman’s astonishing discovery was that the existence of such loops was absolutely certain if the number of kinds of molecules in the soup was large enough. And this number did not have to be very large. A molecular mixture shows a natural transition from boring to fascinating behavior as the number of kinds of molecules grows. This transition forms the basis of a completely new theory in which the origin of life is not improbable, but inevitable.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“So what is the typical rate of growth (or decline) for bird populations? Remarkably, there isn’t one. If the most likely change is no change at all, changes either upward or downward are progressively less likely, and both follow an identical power law. “For the species considered here,” Keitt and Stanley concluded, “there is no characteristic scale of fluctuation in population size….” In other words, what will happen next is unpredictable not only in its direction, up or down, but even in the rough scale of its magnitude. This is, of course, exactly the same kind of scale-invariance we have seen in the critical state. If ecosystems live in a critical state, then large upheavals should be expected, and we should expect to find scale-free distributions everywhere. So you might well wonder: Does this have anything to do with the power law for mass extinctions we met in the last chapter? Could the mass extinctions arise solely from the internal workings of the ecosystem? It is an intriguing idea.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“In the late 1970s, a minor ecological catastrophe was brewing in the grassy countryside of southern England. Hordes of rabbits were devastating hundreds of thousands of acres of rich farmland. Fortunately, the British government had a safe and easy biological solution ready to hand. The myxomatosis virus thrives almost exclusively in the bodies of rabbits. It does not kill them, but makes infected animals sluggish, thereby slowing their breeding and making them more susceptible to predators. By introducing myxomatosis, authorities reasoned, they could manage the rabbit population with little adverse effect on the balance of the countryside ecology. Things were not that simple.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“Every species, after all, is adapted to a certain climate, whatever it might be. If temperatures fall, for example, the species needs to migrate toward the equator to maintain its climate, or adapt to the new, colder conditions. But some species can’t migrate, being blocked by mountains or large lakes or oceans, or because they live in the treetops of forests that don’t extend farther south. Likewise, if the temperature drops too quickly, a species may not be able to adapt rapidly enough, and will simply go extinct.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“Early in the twentieth century, thinkers of all sorts pointed to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity as proof that the truth about anything depends essentially on perspective. It is ironic that for Einstein the theory offered precisely the opposite message. Relativity theory is based on the notion of invariance—that is, on a deep appreciation of things that remain the same even when one makes a change of perspective.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“When it comes to disastrous episodes of financial collapse, revolutions, or catastrophic wars, we all quite understandably long to identify the causes that make these things happen, so that we might avoid them in the future. But we shall soon find power laws in these settings as well, very possibly because the critical state underlies the dynamics of all of these different kinds of upheaval. It appears that, at many levels, our world is at all times tuned to be on the edge of sudden, radical change, and that these and other upheavals may all be strictly unavoidable and unforeseeable, even just moments before they strike. Consequently, our human longing for explanation may be terribly misplaced, and doomed always to go unsatisfied.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“The American physicist Richard Feynman counseled students of quantum theory to avoid falling into an intellectual abyss by asking, “How can it be like that?” Fortunately, there seems to be no danger of this in the case of earthquakes. But understanding “how it can be like that” is not the same as being able to make predictions. Indeed, in this case understanding leads instead to the conclusion that prediction of individual earthquakes is probably impossible, even though the basic picture of the earthquake process is quite simple.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“Trouble is, the real world isn’t like this. If geophysicists don’t know much about the laws of friction between sliding rock surfaces, they do know for sure that there is friction—and this friction ought to eat up some of that force. So the Bak-Tang rule is most certainly not legitimate. Trying to respond to this objection, Bak and Tang altered the rule to make things more realistic. But when they did, the game changed into something else. It wasn’t equivalent any longer to the sandpile game, and its power law evaporated. Earthquakes were not explained.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“One of the chief services which mathematics has rendered the human race in the past century is to put “common sense” where it belongs: on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labeled “discarded nonsense.” —ERIC TEMPLE BELL2”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown—the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none….The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear…. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE1”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“With reluctance, geophysicists are now beginning to accept that every earthquake, large or small, arrives at the far end of a long and immensely complex historical development within the Earth’s crust. As a result, the dynamics of earthquakes can be understood only with the perspectives of historical physics, and especially through the concept of the critical state. The message: Massive quakes may arise out of the very same conditions as small, and quakes of all kinds may be totally unpredictable. As with avalanches in the sandpile game, the largest and most devastating earthquakes may take place when and where they do for no special reason at all.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“Time and again, history has proved a very bad predictor of future events. This is because history never repeats itself; nothing in human society…ever happens twice under exactly the same conditions or in exactly the same way.17 So it is also with earthquakes. There are no cycles, no warnings, no signals, no precursors. The Earth starts shaking whenever it wants to.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“Since my first attachment to seismology, I have had a horror of [earthquake] predictions and predictors. Journalists and the general public rush to any suggestion of earthquake prediction like hogs toward a full trough. —CHARLES RICHTER2”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“If the organization of upheaval and hypersensitivity is everywhere, one need not look far to find it. So let us leave human history and the individual aside for the moment, and first look to the simpler world of inanimate things. Let us go underground, into the dark, gritty world beneath the Earth’s surface, and take a closer look at what goes on there. Surprisingly, in the underworld rumblings of our changeable planet, we shall encounter a way to understand the workings of a thousand things.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“Whatever lessons historians may be able to draw from all this, the meaning for the individual is more ambiguous. For if the world is organized into a critical state, or something much like it, then even the smallest forces can have tremendous effects. In our social and cultural networks, there can be no isolated act, for our world is designed—not by us, but by the forces of nature—so that even the tiniest of acts will be amplified and registered by the larger world. The individual, then, has power, and yet the nature of that power reflects a kind of irreducible existential predicament. If every individual act may ultimately have great consequences, those consequences are almost entirely unforeseeable.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“The art of being wise,” the American philosopher and psychologist William James once wrote, “is the art of knowing what to overlook,”16 and this book is about a terrific step along the scientific road of learning what to overlook. It is about the discovery of a profound similarity not between triangles or moving objects, but between the upheavals that affect our lives, and the ways in which the complicated networks in which they occur—economies, political systems, ecosystems, and so on—are naturally organized.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“The roots of war are to be sought in politics and history, those of earthquakes in geophysics, of forest fires in patterns of weather and in the natural ecology, and those of market crashes in the principles of finance, economics, and the psychology of human behavior. Beyond the labels “disaster” and “upheaval,” each of these events erupted from the soil of its own peculiar setting. Still, there is an intriguing similarity. In each case, it seems, the organization of the system—the web of international relations, the fabric of the forests or of the Earth’s crust, or the network of linked expectations and trading perspectives of investors—made it possible for a small shock to trigger a response out of all proportion to itself. It is as if these systems had been poised on some knife-edge of instability, merely waiting to be “set off.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“Whether it was the unusually dry conditions or the persistent winds, no one can really say, but by the middle of July the fires had only become bigger. “Up until then, with the fires,” a National Park Service spokeswoman later recalled, “it was business as usual.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“But if Yellowstone is a place of almost unfathomable peace, it is also, sporadically, a place of terrific, incendiary violence. Lightning sparks several hundred fires within the park every year. Most burn less than an acre, or maybe a few acres before dying out, while others carry on to destroy a few hundred or, far more rarely, a few thousand. As of 1988, even the largest fire ever recorded, in 1886, had burned only twenty-five thousand acres. So late in June of 1988, when a lightning bolt from a summer thunderstorm sparked a small fire near Yellowstone’s southern boundary, no one was unduly alarmed.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“Japan is known for its earthquakes. A quake releasing ten times as much energy leveled the city of Nobi in central Japan in 1891, and others struck in 1927, 1943, and 1948 at other locations. The intervals between these great earthquakes—thirty-five, sixteen, and five years—hardly form a simple, predictable sequence, as is typical of earthquakes everywhere. If the historian H. A. L. Fisher failed to see in history “a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern,” then so too have geophysicists failed utterly, despite immense effort, to discern any simple pattern in the Earth’s seismic activity. Modern scientists can chart the motions of distant comets or asteroids with stunning precision, yet something about the workings of the Earth makes predicting earthquakes extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“The city of Kōbe is one of the gems of modern Japan. It lies along the southern edge of the largest Japanese island of Honshū, and from there its seaport—the world’s sixth largest—handles each year nearly a third of all Japan’s import and export trade. Kōbe has excellent schools, and its residents bask in what seems to be a haven of environmental stability. The city has good reason to call itself an “urban resort”:9 peaceful sunrises have for centuries given way to bright, warm afternoons, which have in turn slipped into cool, tranquil evenings. If visiting Kōbe, you would never guess that just beneath your feet invisible forces were preparing to unleash unimaginable violence. Unless, of course, you happened to be there at 5:45 A.M., January 17, 1995, when the calm suddenly fell to pieces.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

“So despite their aim to find at least some meaningful patterns in history, it is probably true that many historians sympathize with the historian H. A. L. Fisher, who in 1935 concluded: Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another…and only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen….The ground gained by one generation may be lost by the next.8”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen