System Dynamics Quotes

Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.

Play within the system. Be a decision maker.

The solution of one problem always brings a few more problems to the surface to be solved, which were hidden underneath the theory of transmission.

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots.’

The same law takes place in a system, consisting of many bodies, as in one single body, with regard to their persevering in their state of motion or of rest. For the progressive motion, whether of one single body or of a whole system of bodies, is always to be estimated from the motion of the center of gravity.

If there's no limit to how big the entropy can get, then you can start anywhere, and from that starting point, you'd expect entropy to rise as the system moves to explore larger and larger regions of phase space.

We begin by trying to alter what we can see, but the tremors which our action starts sometimes run through the entire depth our society; levels to which we pay no conscious attention are stirred, and all kinds of unintended results ensue.

Each system will depend on resources available, not from the bottom up or top down. In other words, if you put 500 passengers in an airplane that's designed to carry 100, it won't get off the ground. So all decisions are made based upon the physical equipment you're working with, or the environmental resources available. They're not made by Fresco or any other person. They're arrived at by studies and research.

You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.

Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.

Orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular. Mere orderliness leads to increasing impoverishment and finally to the lowest possible level of structure, no longer clearly distinguishable from chaos, which is the absence of order. A counterprinciple is needed, to which orderliness is secondary. It must supply what is to be ordered.

By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body.

I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me".

What is the cause, though, of the growth of an acorn? The oak that is to come! What is to happen in the future is then the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. In addition, a great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

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 Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

The great unexplored frontier is complexity ... I am convinced that the nations and people that master the new science of Complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century.

You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.

As far as I'm concerned, there is only one study and that is the way in which things relate to one another.

Anyone who believes he is bigger than the system is wrong.

Perpetuating success or sliding into decline is the result of many intersecting forces that reinforce one another directly and indirectly. They are both cause and effect of winning or losing. Winning generates positive forces, losing generates negative forces.

We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization.

We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!