Greg Stroot > Greg's Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Memes can replicate with impressive virulence while leaving swaths of collateral damage—patent medicines and psychic surgery, astrology and satanism, racist myths, superstitions, and (a special case) computer viruses. In a way, these are the most interesting—the memes that thrive to their hosts’ detriment, such as the idea that suicide bombers will find their reward in heaven.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

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

“Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“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.”
― 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

“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

“Mandelbrot saw a seemingly smooth boundary resolve itself into a chain of spirals like the tails of sea horses. The irrational fertilized the rational.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“The ceaseless motion and incomprehensible bustle of life. Feigenbaum recalled the words of Gustav Mahler, describing a sensation that he tried to capture in the third movement of his Second Symphony. Like the motions of dancing figures in a brilliantly lit ballroom into which you look from the dark night outside and from such a distance that the music is inaudible…. Life may appear senseless to you.”
― 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

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

“Somehow the wondrous promise of the earth is that there are things beautiful in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

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

“It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong. The”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Every new molecule would be surrounded by its own spirals and flame like projections, and those, inevitably, would reveal molecules tinier still, always similar, never identical, fulfilling some mandate of infinite variety, a miracle of miniaturisation in which every new detail was sure to be a universe of its own, diverse and entire.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“...the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace.”
― Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms