David Weinberger Quotes

Most of nature is inherently chaotic. It's not rigidly determined in the old sense. It's not rigidly predictable.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

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.

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.

The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

It's a lot of random situations that combine in a certain volatile form and create a bigger-than- the-whole situation that nobody could have predicted.

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.

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

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

Nothing will behave in the logical way you have come to expect.

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

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

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

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

The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.

The world is neither running down nor deterministic, and a strict division of order versus chaos is just wrong.

There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.

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.

A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly.

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.

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.

We have a picture for how complexity arises, because if the universe is computationally capable, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that things are so entirely out of control.

Nature doesn't feel compelled to stick to a mathematically precise algorithm; in fact, nature probably can't stick to an algorithm.

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