John Tukey Quotes

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

You never know why something works or doesn't.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance.

The world is deterministic, but it's chaotic and emergent.

There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.

A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.

They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.' And?' Chaos theory throws it right out the window.

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher.

I also don't believe that "everything happens for a reason," which is in a similar category of world-views.

Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)

To talk of luck and chance only shows how little we really know of the laws which govern cause and effect.

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies

Anything that happens, happens.

If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?

Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for 'chaos' implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions.

Tho' there be no such Thing as Chance in the World; our Ignorance of the real Ccause of any Event has the same Influence on the Understanding, and begets a like Species of Belief or Opinion.

I do not believe such a quality as chance exists. Every incident that happens must be a link in a chain.

But really, there are no coincidences. Coincidences are just other people's choices, plans you don't know about.

Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck.

Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.

Nothing fortuitous happens in a child's world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.

Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary?