Nonlinear Quotes

• People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.

  Dean Kamen

  Mistake, Writing, Simple

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• Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Mean, Outcomes, Tiny

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• Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

  Michael Shermer

  Unpredictable, Humans, Human History

  Michael Shermer (2016). “Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye”, p.154, Henry Holt and Company

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• nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging.

  John Henry Holland

  Would Be, Complicated, Behavior

  John Henry Holland (1995). “Hidden order: how adaptation builds complexity”, Addison-Wesley Longman

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• For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork.

  Neil Gershenfeld

  Smart, Technology, Needs

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• Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Knowledge, Garden, Race

  "The Primer Project". International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) seminar, October 12 - November 10, 1997.

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• To grasp organizational life as it is, read novels (!) .... It is my fervent belief that we will never design rational processes that "overcome" such irregularities-don't bother telling that to a consultant. Hence, we should embrace the real, nonrational, nonlinear world with vigor and glee-and develop enterprise and career strategies accordingly.

  Tom Peters

  Success, Real, Creativity

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• In fact, a very similar phrase was invented to account for the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and concrete into an explosive condition, which was "nonlinear, catastrophic structural exasperation," or to put it another way--as a junior cabinet minister did on television the following night in a phrase which was to haunt the rest of his career--the check-in desk had just got "fundamentally fed up with being where it was.

  Douglas Adams

  Night, Careers, Transition

  "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul". Book by Douglas Adams, 1988.

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• Creativity is a renewable resource. Challenge yourself every day. Be as creative as you like, as often as you want, because you can never run out. Experience and curiosity drive us to make unexpected, offbeat connections. It is these nonlinear steps that often lead to the greatest work.

  Biz Stone

  Running, Creativity, Creative

  Biz Stone (2014). “Things A Little Bird Told Me”, p.21, Pan Macmillan

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• Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.

  Tom Robbins

  Psychics, Data, Challenges

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• Our task now is to resynthesize biology; put the organism back into its environment; connect it again to its evolutionary past; and let us feel that complex flow that is organism, evolution, and environment united. The time has come for biology to enter the nonlinear world.

  Carl Woese

  Past, Tasks, World

  "A New Biology for a New Century" by Carl Woese, mmbr.asm.org. June 1, 2004.

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• If painters could be compared to filmmakers, Bosch is the Hype Williams of renaissance painters. With Bosch, there's always a narrative that is very nonlinear - and that's the essence of a good music video.

  Grimes

  Essence, Hype, Video

  "Grimes: 'Genesis'". Interview with Carrie Battan, pitchfork.com. August 27, 2012.

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• The film [Dream of Life] came together when we started editing; it was organic, it became nonlinear and it was its own animal. And I didn't want to tame it, either. I wanted it to be different. It's not your typical documentary.

  Steven Sebring

  Dream, Animal, Editing

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Synergistic convergence is the most important idea we have at our disposal to prevent collapse scenarios and move forward in a nonlinear manner toward an evolutionary society.

  Barbara Marx Hubbard

  Moving, Ideas, Important

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• Man is the only 150 pound nonlinear servomechanism that can be wholly reproduced by unskilled labor.

  Ashley Montagu

  Men, Pounds, Labor

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