"Systems in many respects resemble machines. A machine is a little system, created to perform, as well as to connect together, in reality, those different movements and effects which the artist has occasion for. A system is an imaginary machine invented to connect together in the fancy those different movements and effects which are already in reality performed. […] The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the fame effects may be more easily produced. The first systems, in the fame manner, are always the most complex, and a particular connecting chain, or principle, is generally thought necessary to unite every two seemingly disjointed appearances: but it often happens, that one great connecting principle is afterwards found to be sufficient to bind together all the discordant phænomena that occur in a whole species of things." (Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations", 1776)
"Since a given system can never of its own accord go over into another equally probable state but into a more probable one, it is likewise impossible to construct a system of bodies that after traversing various states returns periodically to its original state, that is a perpetual motion machine." (Ludwig Boltzmann, "'The Second Law of Thermodynamics", [Address to a Formal meeting of the Imperial Academy of Science], 1886)
"[...] the mystery of mysteries is to view machines making machines [...]" (Benjamin Disraeli, "Coningsby", 1911)
"Physics is not a machine one can take apart; one cannot try each piece in isolation and wait, to adjust it, until its solidity has been minutely checked. Physical science is a system that must be taken as a whole. It is an organism no part of which can be made to function without the remotest parts coming into play, some more, some less, but all in some degree." (Pierre-Maurice-Marie Duhem, 1914)
"The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine."(Humberto Maturana, “Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living”, 1980)
"The worldview of the classical sciences conceptualized nature as a giant machine composed of intricate but replaceable machine-like parts. The new systems sciences look at nature as an organism endowed with irreplaceable elements and an innate but non-deterministic purpose for choice, for flow, for spontaneity." (Ervin László, "The systems view of the world", 1996)
"Every system that we build will surprise us with new kinds of flaws until those machines become clever enough to conceal their faults from us." (Marvin Minsky, "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind", 2006)
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