298 Quotes About Complexity

She wondered if some people got to feel fully full, or whether it was everyone’s fate to feel as if the state of being human was one in which the self was like a bag of something wonderful that had already been half-eaten.

When the term universal comes up, ask: Whose universe? When the term timeless: Who can stand outside of time? When transcends categories: Why not transgress? I don’t want to transcend. I want to sing about living in a tangle of histories and dreams. Embrace that song, I’m reminding myself.

This is unfortunate, but the world is too complex for there to be good reasons for any truly great decision.

These are all problems in non-equilibrium physics, the physics of complex systems, or, to coin a new term historical physics. If the laws of physics are ultimately simple, why is the world so complex? Why don't eco-systems and economies reveal the same simplicity as Newton's laws? The answer, in a word, is history.

In physics—or wherever natural processes seem unpredictable—apparent randomness may be noise or may arise from deeply complex dynamics.

Religious and idealogical dogmas are still highly attractive in our scientific age precisely because they offer us a safe haven from the frustrating complexity of reality.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system

It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences

Aru didn't want to see all those gray spaces between good and bad - she just wanted things to be easy.