in a sense, you could almost say that Darwin was the first chaos theorist. Because they discovered—the people; Darwin and his school—that you could take two processes which are both random, and that by running these two random processes together you could attain striking examples of order and symmetry and beauty. And to them this proved that God is... See more

the whole notion of science is not that we attain states of intellectual consensus, but that we have a true reflection of the phenomena. So then here’s a case where this becomes more important: the speed of light. The speed of light in the general and special theory of relativity is specified to be a constant. So, since 1908, the speed of light has... See more

And someone like Piaget has studied this phenomenon in the development of the drawing styles of young children, and believes, then, that a child essentially—in the spirit of the old song that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—the child develops through these cultural phases. You know, from the iconic hieroglyphic to the flattened—I can’t remember... See more

Habit and novelty are the new—or what I would propose as the two concepts that are rising out of a synthesis of twentieth-century experience as the new defining terms of a universal paradigm

A paradigm touches everything, and it begins very deeply, but I think that my—you know, fractal mathematics, chaos theory, complexity theory, my own stuff with the timewave—all of this is going to, in a sense, erase much of the mystery about the future. That the future is ( in a freedom and law system) necessarily unknowable, because if you knew... See more

Things will have to get a lot worse. Because, you see, the paradox is that the people who can change the world—people like you and me, the upper 5% of the literate elites of the industrial democracies—we’re the furthest away from the bad news. You know, we’re getting three squares, and having a fine time. So somehow there has to be a sense of... See more

You know, the theory of evolution is essentially a theory which is an effort to account for the large numbers of diverse plants and animals on the planet. Darwin, in his diaries, referred to what he was doing as searching for a solution to the species problem. It was not thought to have anything to do with sociology or geology, but now I think we... See more

I think law allows freedom because freedom means you go outside of law. But law doesn’t allow novelty, exactly. That’s a slightly different concept. So if you take seriously this idea that the concept of law can be replaced by the idea of habit, then suddenly you’re not in a Newtonian machine, a soulless cuckoo clock of natural laws. What you’re... See more

And the conclusion that’s coming out of his work is that nature is not governed by eternal laws. Which is a very big piece of news in science, because it has been the assumption (really, since the Greeks) that there is a higher world of mathematical perfection and that, somehow, the world of physical appearance and substance is a shadow in Plato’s... See more