Gregory Benford Quotes

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.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

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

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.

If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful.

It is such a complex matter we live within, it is impossible to track logic and decision making really, so therefore each choice can actually only be seen as coincidence.

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

The world is unpredictable.

'Entropy' broadly means tending towards chaos constantly.

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.

This tremendous friction which cannot, as in mechanics, be reduced to a few points, is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured just because they are largely due to chance.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

We can't all come and go by bubble!

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

I don't plan, because everything goes against my plans anyways. There's absolutely no point in planning anything. I'm just enjoying the moment. I'm meeting with a whole lot of people - casting directors, directors, agents. I have things going on everywhere, but I have no solid plans.

You learn that not all things fall into a certain kind of pattern that can be predictable and that can be understandable and that's going to be easy, you know.

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

At its best, life is completely unpredictable.

Expose yourself to as much randomness as possible.

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.

I truly don't have any formula for the choices I make.

I believe there is true expertise in some endeavors, and not in others. There is obviously no such thing as expertise in predicting the results of coin tosses, but there is expertise in predicting the behavior of lasers.

In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book.

I used to think there was a scientific way to do things. Like a proper way to answer a question or that kind of stuff. It's like, there's not! There's not a method, there's not a science to it.