Scale Invariance Quotes

If you look at a shape like a straight line, what's remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.

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

The straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.

A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.

There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.

The paradox of knowledge is not confined to the small, atomic scale; on the contrary, it is as cogent on the scale of man, and even of the stars.

The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.

The universe is fractal. The closer you look at it, the more interesting it becomes.

If you look at coastlines, if you look at that them from far away, from an airplane, well, you don't see details, you see a certain complication. When you come closer, the complication becomes more local, but again continues. And come closer and closer and closer, the coastline becomes longer and longer and longer because it has more detail entering in.

Self-similarity is a dull subject because you are used to very familiar shapes. But that is not the case. Now many shapes which are self-similar again, the same seen from close by and far away, and which are far from being straight or plane or solid.

A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales...

The fact is I'm very self-similar.