Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

...All the wonders of our universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet ... there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold.

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.

My take is that the kind of complexity which says we can always generate complexity from simple interactions following for example rules.

Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.

There’s so much distance between the fundamental rules and the final phenomenon, that it’s almost unbelievable that the final variety of phenomenon can come from such a steady operation of such simple rules.

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

Things fall apart, so they can fall together at a higher level of order.

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

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

Orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular. Mere orderliness leads to increasing impoverishment and finally to the lowest possible level of structure, no longer clearly distinguishable from chaos, which is the absence of order. A counterprinciple is needed, to which orderliness is secondary. It must supply what is to be ordered.

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

There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead

Disorder brings about order.

The beauty of compounding iterative algorithms - evolution, fractals, organic growth, art - derives from their irreducibility.

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

Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason for or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one.

Chaos is the enemy of Order but the enemy of Chaos is also the enemy of Order

Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.

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.

We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.

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.

All we know about the world teaches us that the effects of A and B are always different-in some decimal place-for any A and B. Thus asking "are the effects different?" is foolish.

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge

I think the next century will be the century of complexity.

A modern mathematical proof is not very different from a modern machine, or a modern test setup: the simple fundamental principles are hidden and almost invisible under a mass of technical details.