Catastrophic Quote by Per Bak

“profoundly complex systems”

— William Brinkley

“It becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of “nonlinear” interaction.”

— Pearl Zhu

Complex systems are hard to understand, predict and control.

— Dominic Cummings

Deep in the chaotic regime, slight changes in structure almost always cause vast changes in behavior. Complex controllable behavior seems precluded.

— Stuart Kauffman

“It is always easier to destroy a complex system than to selectively alter it.”

— Roby James

“All unnatural control systems have a key element in their intricate composition – the fatality that they will naturally collapse.”

— Robert Neil Fleischer

“Dichotomies are most mischevious when they arbitrarily separate parts of a highly interrelated and complex system.”

— David Ehrenfeld

In complex systems, one can think about linear interactions and complex or nonlinear interactions.

— Zeynep Tufekci

“The term we use for the unanticipated result from these interactions is emergence. While not all interactions create emergent effects, when emergence does occur…

— Rich Jolly

“all these complex systems have somehow acquired the ability to bring order and chaos into a special kind of balance. This balance point—often called…

— M. Mitchell Waldrop

“Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable.”

— Howard Pattee

The only way to know how a complex system will behave-after you modify it-is to modify it and see how it behaves.

— George E. P. Box