Chaos Theory Quotes

“In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the
cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat
could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“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.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

“The amazing thing is that chaotic systems don't always stay chaotic," Ben said, leaning on the gate. "Sometimes they spontaneously reorganize themselves into an orderly structure."

"They suddenly become less chaotic?" I said, wishing that would happen at HiTek.

"No, that's the thing. They become more and more chaotic until they reach some sort of chaotic critical mass. When that happens, they spontaneously reorganize themselves at a higher equilibrium level. It's called self-organized criticality.”
― Connie Willis, Bellwether

“هل هي مصادفة؟! إن للمصادفة كذلك قانوناً يستحيل معه أن تتوافر هذه الموافقات كلها من قبيل المصادفة - فلا يبقى إلا أن هنالك مدبراً يخلق الذكر والأنثى لحكمة مرسومة وغاية معلومة - فلا مجال للمصادفة، ولا مكان للتلقائية في نظام هذا الوجود أصلاً.”
― محمد متولي الشعراوي, تفسير جزء عم

“Government succeeds by failing.”
― L.K. Samuels

“... although the future is not predictable in any detail, it is manageable as an aggregate phenomenon.”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention”
― John le Carre, Conversations With John le Carré

“Chaos has become not just theory but also method, not just a canon of beliefs but also a way of doing science.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“That was acceptable, his father told him: you can always try to solve a problem by proving that no solution exists.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Revolutions do not come piecemeal. One account of nature replaces another.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Implicitly, the mission of many twentieth-century scientists — biologists, neurologists, economists — has been to break their universes down into the simplest atoms that will obey scientific rules.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“The repetitions were never quite exact. There was pattern, with disturbances. An orderly disorder.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Had he stopped with the Butterfly Effect, an image of predictability giving way to pure randomness, then Lorenz would have produced no more than a piece of very bad news. But Lorenz saw more than randomness embedded in his weather model. He saw a fine geometrical structure, order masquerading as randomness.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“The Butterfly Effect was no accident; it was necessary.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules. [...] Analyzing the behavior of a nonlinear equation like the Navier-Stokes equation is like walking through a maze whose walls rearrange themselves with each step you take.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Not by accident, he made scientists seem less than perfect rationalists.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“By contrast, a twentieth-century fluid dynamicist could hardly expect to advance knowledge in his field without first adopting a body of terminology and mathematical technique. In return, unconsciously, he would give up much freedom to question the foundations of his science.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Some carry out their work explicitly denying that it is a revolution; others deliberately use Kuhn’s language of paradigm shifts to describe the changes they witness.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“In daily life, the
Lorenzian quality of sensitive dependence on initial conditions lurks

everywhere. A man leaves the house in the morning thirty seconds late, a
flowerpot misses his head by a few millimeters, and then he is run over by a
truck. Or, less dramatically, he misses a bus that runs every ten minutes—his
connection to a train that runs every hour. Small perturbations in one’s daily
trajectory can have large consequences. A batter facing a pitched ball knows that
approximately the same swing will not give approximately the same result,
baseball being a game of inches. Science, though—science was different.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“The danger of generative AI is that it lacks the ability to understand misinformation, leading to incorrectly equating correlation with causation based on incomplete/inaccurate data or lack of contextual awareness required to understand sensitive dependencies between data sets. The unintended consequence is technology shaping societal views on politics, culture and science.”
― Tom Golway

“Cada ação encerra em si um elemento de caos.”
― Olga Ravn, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century

“There was a point in his life where he—for lack of a better word—fell into himself. Became could be that better word lacking. Became is a good word. He believed that everybody had a character, a self that they would inevitably become. Years go by, we trudge along, and we collect pieces of ourselves, traits and beliefs, habits and opinions, compulsions and decisions, until we are.”
― Kyle St Germain, Dysfunction

“Then, in a blink, his ghost of memory was gone, leaving behind only the uncomfortable feeling of having been someone other than himself for a sliced instant of his life. He felt as if he were stuck between two futures, and whatever he did next would become the decision to live in one of them.”
― Kyle St Germain, Dysfunction

“Danny left the store, confident that he may have found a way to tilt this day a little more straighter standing, into something that didn’t so much resemble Pisa’s monument. Tracks of fate had begun to run a little too perpendicular with him today, rather than the parallel direction they usually run. He was realizing that parallel wasn’t so bad, no, in fact, he kind of missed it. Mostly, though, he just wanted some coffee.
With each step, he felt as though a stony weight lifted off his chest. It had been there all morning, that heaviness, like an invisible albatross, a cartoon cinder block holding him down. He hadn’t realized the true size of it until, all at once, it dropped away, disappearing into the day without even a sound. Just a breath. His chest expanded as he took in as much air as he could hold, feeling good. Decisions were always cathartic, no matter their size.”
― Kyle St Germain, Dysfunction

“Things fall into place before they start falling apart.”
― Khayri R.R. Woulfe

“Anarchy solves all rebellions. No government, no rebellion.”
― Khayri R.R. Woulfe