"As the natural sciences have developed to encompass increasingly complex systems, scientific rationality has become ever more statistical, or probabilistic. The deterministic classical mechanics of the enlightenment was revolutionized by the near-equilibrium statistical mechanics of late 19th century atomists, by quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, and by the far-from-equilibrium complexity theorists of the later 20th century. Mathematical neo-Darwinism, information theory, and quantitative social sciences compounded the trend. Forces, objects, and natural types were progressively dissolved into statistical distributions: heterogeneous clouds, entropy deviations, wave functions, gene frequencies, noise-signal ratios and redundancies, dissipative structures, and complex systems at the edge of chaos."
React to this quote
More by Nick Land
See allResonant Thoughts
"Multiple discoveries are in fact very common in science and for much the same reason. Developments in related fields with different motivation help one to understand a difficult problem better. Since …"
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"Economics is not politics. One is a science, concerned with the immutable and constant laws of nature that …"
— Frank Chodorov"I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professio…"
— Stephen Jay Gould"There is no such thing as maturity. There is instead an ever-evolving process of maturing. Because when the…"
— Bruce Lee"“Funny thing about those Middle Ages,” said Joseph. “They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they…"
— Kage Baker"Science frees us in many ways...from the bodily terror which the savage feels. But she replaces that, in th…"
— Charles Kingsley"Where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes."
— Imre Lakatos