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Charles A. Fink
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Science Quotes by Charles A. Fink (1 quote)
Most persons seem not to want to face complexity and not to want to admit that much of nature is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as “chaos” in the short term.
— Charles A. Fink
From Paper by Charles A. Fink, 'Opportunities for Broadening Brain Functioning While Modeling Cyberbetic Dynamics', collected in International Association for Cybernetics, Gautier-Villars (ed.), Proceedings of the 12th International Congress of Cybernetics, Namur, Belgium, Aug 1989, 485. [This is widely seen on the web—attributed to Benoit Mandelbrot—with a spurious ellipsis thus: “The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set … is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as “chaos.” Paragraphs earlier on the page, is the unrelated line, “This videoclip shows what has been called the most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set.” It is clearly a non-sequitur to link the two excerpted phrases with an ellipsis, when considered with more context of each phrase. The two phrases are now separate quotes on this website, and not attributed as a direct quote by Mandelbrot. —Webmaster (1 Nov 2021)]
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
