Nonlinearity Quotes

It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly!

The world is generally multivariate

The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

Life is like a cobweb, not an organization chart.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.

Nature doesn't feel compelled to stick to a mathematically precise algorithm; in fact, nature probably can't stick to an algorithm.

Time's arrow, we are told, is a one-way thing. . . Memory's arrow, like the needle of a compass too close to a lodestone, spins in all directions.

Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at.

The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.

Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more--let me see--more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps ... as prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters.

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.

Writing a novel is like trying to solve a very long mathematical equation. Changing anything can change everything else.

Like Thornton Wilder said, time is not a river, but rather a landscape that you step in and out of. I've always found that true of creative work, and I've heard so many songwriters and writers in general say the same thing... When you're going into the realms of your self and trying to tap into the mystery of this creative source, linear time kind of falls away.

Time is very weird.

There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.

The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

It feels like we're always juggling many pieces of information at once or trying out many personas at once. It makes life slightly nonlinear.

Where do I really belong? I avoid saying everywhere - which switches all too easily to nowhere. Instead, when pressed, I call myself a fractalist.

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.