Complexity

First annotation on Jun 29th, 2023.

9 quotes

This balance point—often called the edge of chaos—is were the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either.Jun 29 2023 1:27AM
The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive.Jun 29 2023 1:28AM

Why is it that simple particles obeying simple rules will sometimes engage in the most astonishing, unpredictable behavior? And why is it that simple particles will spontaneously organize themselves into complex structures like stars, galaxies, snowflakes, and hurricanes—almost as if they were obeying a hidden yearning for organization and order?Jun 29 2023 1:30AM
“The culture doesn’t equip you to lead, but to undermine,” he says. Look at whom the Irish admire: Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Daniel O’Connell, Padraic Pearse. “All the Irish heroes were revolutionaries. The highest peak of heroism is to lead an absolutely hopeless revolution, and then give the greatest speech of your life from the dock—the night before you’re hanged. “In Ireland,” he says, “an appeal to authority never works.”Jun 29 2023 1:34AM
“I think I annoyed several of my professors by showing a great deal of impatience with theorems, and by wanting to know about the real economy,”Jun 29 2023 1:36AM
“Instead of solving incredibly complicated equations, he taught me to keep simplifying the problem until you found something you could deal with. Look for what made a problem tick. Look for the key factor, the key ingredient, the key solution.” Dreyfus would not let him get away with fancy mathematics for its own sake.Jun 29 2023 1:37AM

Einstein was certainly a hero to a teenaged boy named Stuart Kauffman. “I admired Einstein enormously,” he says. “No—admired is the wrong word. Loved. I loved his image of theory as the free invention of the human mind. And I loved his idea that science was a quest for the secrets of the Old One”—Einstein’s metaphor for the creator of the universe.Jun 29 2023 1:41AM
“You don’t want to ask that much of either God or selection. If we had to explain the order in biology by lots of detailed, incredibly improbable bits of selection, and ad hocery, if everything we see was a hard struggle in the beginning, we wouldn’t be here. There simply was not world enough and time for chance to have brought it forth.”Jun 29 2023 1:42AM

Developed the previous year by the English mathematician John Conway, the Game of Life wasn’t actually a game that you played; it was more like a miniature universe that evolved as you watched. You started out with the computer screen showing a snapshot of this universe: a two-dimensional grid full of black squares that were “alive” and white squares that were “dead.”Jun 29 2023 1:39AM

bookstand