John von Neumann Quotes

the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered

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.

The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

Silicon Valley builds its bridges on abundance. Abundant bits of information floating out there, writing great programs to process it, then giving people a lot of useful tools to use it.

Computing technology started out as number-crunching.

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.

Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.

If you look at any kind of modern organization and you think, 'What are the foremost tools of power?' You will find that it is information.

The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more., Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation.

Organizational changes to fix the problems usually create new vulnerabilities in the process of fixing the old ones.

This [hydrogen] is the only technology we know of that can change the game

Just as the stone age did not end for lack of stones, the oil age will not end because of a scarcity of oil.

The nation that leads the clean energy economy will lead the global economy.

The workers and professionals of the world will soon be divided into two distinct groups. Those who will control computers and those who will be controlled by computers. It would be best for you to be in the former group.

We are much better at creating complex technologies than we are at controlling them.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

Software makes the world go round.

My mother worked for Confederation of Indian Industry, and Aptech Computers.

The entire brain of the organization is here. The construction drawings and data processing all takes place in Rotterdam.

For the longest time, computers have been associated with work. Mainframes were for the Army, government agencies, and then large companies. Workstations were for engineers and software programmers. PCs were initially for other white-collar jobs.

A rough rule in life is that an organization foolish in one way in dealing with a complex system is all too likely to be foolish in another.

Human needs are served by a sustainable lifestyle, almost by definition, if humans include coming generations. And a shift to such technologies as high-speed rail instead of maximizing fossil fuel use, and solar energy, is not "relentless resource extraction."

Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.

Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet.