"For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the new artist is not so much the invention of new objects as the revelation of previously unrecognized relation- ships between existing phenomena, both physical and metaphysical. So we find that ecology is art in the most fundamental and pragmatic sense, expanding our apprehension of reality." (Gene Youngblood, "Expanded Cinema", 1970)
"Because the subject matter of cybernetics is the propositional or informational aspect of the events and objects in the natural world, this science is forced to procedures rather different from those of the other sciences. The differentiation, for example, between map and territory, which the semanticists insist that scientists shall respect in their writings must, in cybernetics, be watched for in the very phenomena about which the scientist writes. Expectably, communicating organisms and badly programmed computers will mistake map for territory; and the language of the scientist must be able to cope with such anomalies." (Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972)
"The beauty of physics lies in the extent which seemingly complex and unrelated phenomena can be explained and correlated through a high level of abstraction by a set of laws which are amazing in their simplicity." (Melvin Schwartz, "In Principles of Electrodynamics", 1972)
"The model of an object, process or phenomenon is some other object, process or phenomenon having certain features in common with the original. It is ordinarily assumed that the model is a simplified version of the object of study. However, it is not always easy to give precise meaning to the concept 'simpler than the original', for the simple reason that in reality all entities or phenomena are infinitely complicated and their study can be carried out with differing and constantly increasing degrees of accuracy."
"A model is an abstract description of the real world. It is a simple representation of more complex forms, processes and functions of physical phenomena and ideas." (Moshe F Rubinstein & Iris R Firstenberg, "Patterns of Problem Solving", 1975)
"For the mathematician, the physical way of thinking is merely the starting point in a process of abstraction or idealization. Instead of being a dot on a piece of paper or a particle of dust suspended in space, a point becomes, in the mathematician's ideal way of thinking, a set of numbers or coordinates. In applied mathematics we must go much further with this process because the physical problems under consideration are more complex. We first view a phenomenon in the physical way, of course, but we must then go through a process of idealization to arrive at a more abstract representation of the phenomenon which will be amenable to mathematical analysis." (Peter Lancaster, "Mathematics: Models of the Real World", 1976)
"General systems theory deals with the most fundamental concepts and aspects of systems. Many theories dealing with more specific types of systems (e. g., dynamical systems, automata, control systems, game-theoretic systems, among many others) have been under development for quite some time. General systems theory is concerned with the basic issues common to all these specialized treatments. Also, for truly complex phenomena, such as those found predominantly in the social and biological sciences, the specialized descriptions used in classical theories (which are based on special mathematical structures such as differential or difference equations, numerical or abstract algebras, etc.) do not adequately and properly represent the actual events. Either because of this inadequate match between the events and types of descriptions available or because of the pure lack of knowledge, for many truly complex problems one can give only the most general statements, which are qualitative and too often even only verbal. General systems theory is aimed at providing a description and explanation for such complex phenomena." (Mihajlo D. Mesarovic & Yasuhiko Takahare, "General Systems Theory: Mathematical foundations", 1975)
"Imagination is the outreaching of mind […] the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images and every sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to ‘dream dreams and see visions’" (Rollo May, "The Courage to Create", 1975)
"Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a ‘correct’ one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William of Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity." (George Box, "Science and Statistics", Journal of the American Statistical Association 71, 1976)
"Under the present dominance of formalism, one is tempted to paraphrase Kant: the history of mathematics, lacking the guidance of philosophy, has become blind, while the philosophy of mathematics, turning its back on the most intriguing phenomena in the of mathematics, has become empty." (Imre Lakatos, "Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery", 1976)
"[…] the equation of small oscillations of a pendulum also holds for other vibrational phenomena. In investigating swinging pendulums we were, albeit unwittingly, also investigating vibrating tuning forks." (George Pólya, "Mathematical Methods in Science", 1977)
"The branch of modern science called cybernetics gives us concepts that describe the evolutionary process at both the level of intracellular structures and the level of social phenomena. The fundamental unity of the evolutionary process at all levels of organization is transformed from a philosophical view to a scientifically substantiated fact." (Valentin F Turchin, "The Phenomenon of Science: A cybernetic approach to human evolution", 1977)
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