Just 3 Quotes: Paradigm Shift
06.07.2021
3 quotes from 3 books. Sent weekly.
Enjoy!
—Mark
“Not only did the Apaches survive the Spanish attacks, but amazingly, the attacks served to make them even stronger. When the Spanish attacked them, the Apaches became even more decentralized and even more difficult to conquer. When the Spanish destroyed their villages, the Apaches might have surrendered if the villages had been crucial to their society. But they weren't. Instead, the Apaches abandoned their old houses and became nomads.“
—The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom (2008)
“In every paradigm, scientists discover a logical structure that makes sense of a portion of the world and gives them an intellectual foundation to which they cling until the discrepancies and inconsistencies grow so unsettling as to force them to break with tradition and alter some of their cherished ideas.”
—Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen, by Mark Buchanan (2000)
“The fundamental equations of general relativity are nonlinear—already a signal, we know by now, that chaos lurks. ‘People aren’t always well versed in its methods,’ says Janna Levin, an astrophysicist and cosmologist at Barnard College of Columbia University. ‘Theoretical physics in particular is built on the notion of fundamental symmetries,’ she notes. ‘For that reason, I think it’s been a difficult paradigm shift for theoretical physics to embrace.’”
—Chaos: Making A New Science, by James Gleick (1987)