- 1932: “The rest is chemistry.”; C. D. Anderson; echoing the success of a reductionist approach to understanding the workings of nature after having discovered the positron.
- 1972: “At each stage [of complexity] entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary […]. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry.”; P. W. Anderson; pointing out that the knowledge about the constituents of a system doesn’t reveal any insights into how the system will behave as a whole, e.g., life, consciousness, …; quote from a Science publication called “More is Different” (Vol. 177, No. 4047).
- 1980: “…I want to discuss the possibility that the goal of theoretical physics [finding a complete, consistent and unified theory of physical interactions describing all physical observations] might be achieved in the not too distant future say, by the end of the century.”; S. Hawking; at the time, 11-dimensional supergravity looked like an exciting candidate, only to be succeeded by superstring and M-theory, and rivaled by loop quantum gravity - to date there is no empirical evidence validating or falsifying these mathematical formalisms; quote from his inaugural lecture as the Lucasian Professor of mathematics at Cambridge.
- 2000: “I think the next century will be the century of complexity.”; S. Hawking; after the last century was arguably the century of the quantum; quote from a newspaper interview.
c d anderson, complex systems, complexity, elementary physics, emergence, p w anderson, physics, quotes, reductionism, s hawking, theoretical physics
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