James Gleick, Chaos: Making A New Science Quotes
Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.
You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it
Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.
Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.
it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.
The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.
The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.
Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.