⚛Week 2020-48: Lawrence K Samuels - Collected Quotes

"Chaos provides order. Chaotic agitation and motion are needed to create overall, repetitive order." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013) 

"Complexity has the propensity to overload systems, making the relevance of a particular piece of information not statistically significant. And when an array of mind-numbing factors is added into the equation, theory and models rarely conform to reality." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"Decentralized systems are the quintessential patrons of simplicity. They allow complexity to rise to a level at which it is sustainable, and no higher." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"Disorder is more exacting, arising when coercion is substituted for coordination - preventing members in a system from determining their own destiny. History is littered with examples of excluded parts rising up to confront those exclusive few who claim they are representing the whole." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos", 2013)

"Paradoxes often arise because theory routinely refuses to be subordinate to reality." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"Simplicity in a system tends to increase that system's efficiency. Because less can go wrong with fewer parts, less will. Complexity in a system tends to increase that system's inefficiency; the greater the number of variables, the greater the probability of those variables clashing, and in turn, the greater the potential for conflict and disarray. Because more can go wrong, more will. That is why centralized systems are inclined to break down quickly and become enmeshed in greater unintended consequences." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"Without precise predictability, control is impotent and almost meaningless." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"The problem of complexity is at the heart of mankind’s inability to predict future events with any accuracy." (Lawrence K Samuels, "The Real Science Behind Changing Climate", LewRockwell.com, August 1, 2014) 

 
"Without chaos there would be no creation, no structure and no existence. After all, order is merely the repetition of patterns; chaos is the process that establishes those patterns. Without this creative self-organizing force, the universe would be devoid of biological life, the birth of stars and galaxies - everything we have come to know." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Chaos Gets a Bad Rap: Importance of Chaology to Liberty", 2015)

⚛Week 2020-47:Pierre T de Chardin - Collected Quotes

"Religion and science are the two conjugated faces of phases of one and the same act of complete knowledge - the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfill them." (Pierre T de Chardin, "The Phenomenon of Man", 1955)

"Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole." (Pierre T de Chardin, "The Phenomenon of Man", 1955)

"The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe - even a positive one - remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world." (Pierre T de Chardin, "The Phenomenon of Man", 1955)

"The world can no more have two summits than a circumference can have two centres." (Pierre T de Chardin, "The Divine Milieu", 1960)

"Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter." (Pierre T de Chardin)

"Life does not work by following a single thread, nor yet by fits and starts. It pushes forward its whole network at one and the same time." (Pierre T de Chardin)
"The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed." (Pierre T de Chardin)

"To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature." (Pierre T de Chardin)

"To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else." (Pierre T de Chardin)

"What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle." (Pierre T de Chardin)

⚛Week 2020-46: R Buckminster Fuller - Collected Quotes

"A problem adequately stated is a problem well on its way to being solved." (R Buckminster Fuller, "I Seem to be a Verb", 1970)

"Lack of knowledge concerning all the factors and the failure to include them in our integral imposes false conclusions." (R Buckminster Fuller, "Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking", 1975)

"Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment." (R Buckminster Fuller, [Interview in the Minneapolis Tribune] 1978)

"Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience. Humans have learned only through mistakes." (Buckminster Fuller, "R Buckminster Fuller on education", 1979)

"It seems that truth is progressive approximation in which the relative fraction of our spontaneously tolerated residual error constantly diminishes." (R Buckminster Fuller, "Humans in Universe", 1983)

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." (R Buckminster Fuller)

⚛Week 2020-45: James Gleick - Collected Quotes

"Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility." (James Gleick, "Chaos: Making a New Science", 1987)

"In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity." (James Gleick, "Chaos: Making a New Science", 1987)

"You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it." (James Gleick, "Chaos: Making a New Science", 1987)

"Randomness might be defined in terms of order - its absence, that is. […] Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace." (James Gleick, "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood", 2011)

"Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace." (James Gleick, "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood", 2011)

"It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness." (James Gleick, "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood", 2011) 

"The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy." (James Gleick, "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood", 2011)

"When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive." (James Gleick, "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood", 2011)