Top 37 Complexity Science Quotes
#1. Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.
Heinz Pagels
#3. The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
William James
#4. Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.
Herbert A. Simon
#5. Complexity demands resilience, and that's what panarchy offers. Resilience in the face of complexity is a challenge even when you apply rigorous intelligence and integrity to develop a coherent and flexible strategy.
Robert David Steele
#6. At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun things we do not usually see cans of soup doing.
Philip Nelson
#7. [In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world ... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#8. Amazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this complexity possible. Realization of the complexity of what is accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word 'miraculous' without taking a stand as to the ontological status of the word.
George F. R. Ellis
#9. Wishing the world was predictable an controllable does not make it so, and it might make us disregard what is actually happening
Jean G. Boulton
#10. When once one believes in a creed, one is proud of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity of science. It shows how rich it is in discoveries. If it is right at all, it is a compliment to say that it's elaborately right.
G.K. Chesterton
#11. Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable.
Howard Pattee
#13. If Ediacara survivors had been able to evolve internal complexity later on, then the pathways from this radically different starting point would have produced a world worthy of science fiction at its best.
Stephen Jay Gould
#14. I replaced emotional complexity with visual and intellectual complexity. I questioned everything and looked to logic, science, and intellect for answers.
Temple Grandin
#15. Two professors who study the science of complexity - Brenda Zimmerman of York University and Sholom Glouberman of the University of Toronto - have proposed a distinction among three different kinds of problems in the world: the simple, the complicated, and the complex.
Atul Gawande
#16. One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.
Jared Diamond
#17. This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine.
Terence McKenna
#18. Although science is not easy in complex human systems, we cannot afford to throw our hands in the air and give up. It may take decades, but it is a game worth playing and winning.
Paul Gibbons
#20. Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that.
Richard Dawkins
#21. There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity of a universe we cannot begin to understand.
Bones The Doctor In The Photo
#22. It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. Don't you sometimes feel bewildered when you think of the millions of things that put life together?' ... 'I;m not bewildered. I'm filled with the deepest awe and wonder. The miracle is that in its complexity it all works.
Julie Andrews Edwards
#24. If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.
Ian Stewart
#25. Ideology follows the money."
"Governments don't protect people, people protect governments."
"To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war.
Lawrence Samuels
#26. The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.
Michael Denton
#27. The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.
Edward O. Wilson
#28. The great unexplored frontier is complexity ... I am convinced that the nations and people that master the new science of Complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century.
Heinz Pagels
#29. My background is in math and science, and I thrive on complexity, and I think lots of people do. People love puzzles; it's human nature to want to solve puzzles.
Michael Loceff
#30. Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
Eugene Paul Wigner
#31. In the U.S. there are two types of hipsters: those who know how to program and those who serve coffee.
Cesar Hidalgo
#32. Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.
Thomas Sowell
#33. The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
Thomas Sowell
#34. In private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life ... Darwin never imagined the exquisitely profound complexity that exists even at the most basic levels of life.
Michael Behe
#35. Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
Alan Kay
#36. I think that I am among the few lucky ones who are exploiting complexity. Most people are unhappy with the emergence of complexity, they would prefer it if the world were very simple, but then it would be a doom for a cryptographer like myself.
Adi Shamir
#37. Anyway, so you take your space and hook it into the spaces of others, and it becomes this massive network of hooked profiles and spaced out stuff that gives rise to all kinds of newish social phenomena based on the mathematics of exponential expansion and the science of complexity.
Zubin J. Shroff
