Chaos Quotes

“Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Nature forms patterns. Some are orderly in space but disorderly in time, others orderly in time but disorderly in space. Some patterns are fractal, exhibiting structures self-similar in scale. Others give rise to steady states or oscillating ones. Pattern formation has become a branch of physics and of materials science, allowing scientists to model the aggregation of particles into clusters, the fractured spread of electrical discharges, and the growth of crystals in ice and metal alloys. The dynamics seem so basic—shapes changing in space and time—yet only now are the tools available to understand them.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Science was constructed against a lot of nonsense,”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Somehow, after all, as the universe ebbs toward its final equilibrium in the featureless heat bath of maximum entropy, it manages to create interesting structures.”
― James Gleick, 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.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“The spot is a self-organizing system, created and regulated by the same nonlinear twists that create the unpredictable turmoil around it. It is stable chaos.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Lorenz saw it differently. Yes, you could change the weather. You could make it do something different from what it would otherwise have done. But if you did, then you would never know what it would otherwise have done. It would be like giving an extra shuffle to an already well-shuffled pack of cards. You know it will change your luck, but you don’t know whether for better or worse.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave. Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor approach. Textbooks showed students only the rare non-linear systems that would give way to such techniques. They did not display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Nonlinear systems with real chaos were rarely taught and rarely learned. When people stumbled across such things-and people did-all their training argued for dismissing them as aberrations. Only a few were able to remember that the solvable, orderly, linear systems were the aberrations. Only a few, that is, understood how nonlinear nature is in its soul. Enrico Fermi once exclaimed, "It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly!" The mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam remarked that to call the study of chaos "nonlinear science" was like calling zoology "the study of nonelephant animals.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“But unpredictability was not the reason physicists and mathematicians began taking pendulums seriously again in the sixties and seventies. Unpredictability was only the attention-grabber. Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things. That was why scientists played with toys.”
― James Gleick, 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 imagination. Some chaos exists out there, and the brain seems to have more flexibility than classical physics in finding the order in it.”
― James Gleick, 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.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Chaos is a creator of information—another apparent paradox.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“to call the study of chaos “nonlinear science” was like calling zoology “the study of non elephant animals.”
― James Gleick, 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 accumulated but also generated—created from connections that were not there before”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“He worked for two months without pause. His functional day was twenty-two hours. He would try to go to sleep in a kind of buzz, and awaken two hours later with his thoughts exactly where he had left them. His diet was strictly coffee. (Even when healthy and at peace, Feigenbaum subsisted exclusively on the reddest possible meat, coffee, and red wine. His friends speculated that he must be getting his vitamins from cigarettes.) In the end, a doctor called it off. He prescribed a modest regimen of Valium and an enforced vacation. But by then Feigenbaum had created a universal theory.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“سارت الشمس في سماء لم تر الغيوم البتة. وكنست الريح أرضا ملساء كالزجاج. لم يأت الليل البتة، ولا فسح الخريف الطريق أمام الشتاء”
― جايمس غليك, Chaos: Making a New Science

“It had been well known for twenty years that the distribution of large and small earthquakes followed a particular mathematical pattern, precisely the same scaling pattern that seemed to govern the distribution of personal incomes in a free-market economy.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Revolutions do not come piecemeal. One account of nature replaces another.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Chaos has become not just theory but also method, not just a canon of beliefs but also a way of doing science.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“That was acceptable, his father told him: you can always try to solve a problem by proving that no solution exists.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“If a model did anything too obviously bizarre—flooded the Sahara or tripled interest rates—the programmers would revise the equations to bring the output back in line with expectation. In practice, econometric models proved dismally blind to what the future would bring, but many people who should have known better acted as though they believed in the results. Forecasts of economic growth or unemployment were put forward with an implied precision of two or three decimal places. Governments and financial institutions paid for such predictions and acted on them, perhaps out of necessity or for want of anything better. Presumably they knew that such variables as “consumer optimism” were not as nicely measurable as “humidity” and that the perfect differential equations had not yet been written for the movement of politics and fashion. But few realized how fragile was the very process of modeling flows on computers, even when the data was reasonably trustworthy and the laws were purely physical, as in weather forecasting.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“THE MANDELBROT SET IS the most complex object in mathematics, its admirers like to say. An eternity could not be enough time to see it all, its disks studded with prickly thorns, its spirals and filaments curling outward and around, bearing bulbous molecules that hang, infinitely variegated, like grapes on God's personal vine.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“The principle is that nature does something against its own will, and by self-entanglement, produces beauty.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science