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I think there's a personality that goes with this kind of thing [complexity theory]. It's people who like process and pattern, as opposed to people who are comfortable with stasis and order. I know that every time in my life that I've run across simple rules giving rise to emergent, complex messiness, I've just said, “Ah, isn't that lovely!” And I think that sometimes, when other people run across it, they recoil.
—W. Brian Arthur, quoted by Waldrop (1992)
One is reminded … of the words of the French mathematician, Henri Poincaré, the discoverer of what we now call chaos, that “the aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity assume, but the relations among things; outside these relations there is no reality knowable.”
—J. A. Scott Kelso (1997)
At the University of Moscow, distinguished visiting physicists are asked to leave on a blackboard some statement for posterity. Niels Bohr, father of the quantum theory of the atom, inscribed the motto of his famous principle of complementarity, “Contraria non contradictoria sed complementa sunt” (opposites are not contradictory but complementary).
—R. C. Hovis and H. Kragh (1993)