Stephen Hawking Quotes

I'm interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence - that it's possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions - is fascinating.

Disorder can play a critical role in giving birth to new, higher forms of order.

I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.

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.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

And so from that, I've always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity.

In little localized pockets, the universe is capable of building some beautiful complexity.

It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.

Mankind is still embryonic ... [man is] the bud from which something more complicated and more centered than man himself should emerge.

For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.

Change is not only likely, it's inevitable.

Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.

The speed of change makes you wonder what will become of architecture.

I tried to develop some theories that took account of the uncertainty in the world and the complexity in the world.

It is hard to say what the future holds, but this is probable - it won't be just like the past.

You can never plan the future by the past.

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

If you look through the century, certain things have gotten better and certain things have gotten worse. I wouldn't say overall that things have gotten better. I think you could say things have gotten worse, but I don't think you could say that things have gotten better. Overall. You can't say that.

I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity.

We are living toward incredible times where the only constant is change, and the rate of change is increasing.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.