“As shorthand, when the phenomena are suitably simple, words such as equilibrium and stability are of great value and convenience. Nevertheless, it should be always borne in mind that they are mere shorthand, and that the phenomena will not always have the simplicity that these words presuppose.”

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part I: Mechanism, p. 85

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "As shorthand, when the phenomena are suitably simple, words such as equilibrium and stability are of great value and co…" by W. Ross Ashby?

W. Ross Ashby26

British psychiatrist 1903–1972

Related quotes

“I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“Mystery is a word with no objective pertinence, merely describing the limitations of a mind. In fact, a mind may be classified by the order of the phenomena it considers mysterious.… The mystery is resolved, the solution made known. “Of course, it is obvious!” comes the chorus. A word about the obvious: it is always obvious.… The common mind transposed the sequence, letting the mystery generate the solution. This is logic in reverse; actually the mystery relates to the solution as the foam relates to the beer.…”

Jack Vance book The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph

The Unspeakable McInch (p. 39; all ellipses in the original)
Short fiction, The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph (1966)

“Theories usually result from the precipitate reasoning of an impatient mind which would like to be rid of phenomena and replaces them with images, concepts, indeed often with mere words.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Maxim 428, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

“Phenomena appear, in a word, to be explicable on the ground of development.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

We have already seen that various leading animal forms represent stages in the embryotic progress of the highest—the human being. Our brain goes through the various stages of a fish's, a reptile's, and a mammifer's brain, and finally becomes human.
Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 306

“Nevertheless, it remains conceivable that the measure relations of space in the infinitely small are not in accordance with the assumptions of our geometry [Euclidean geometry], and, in fact, we should have to assume that they are not if, by doing so, we should ever be enabled to explain phenomena in a more simple way.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Memoir (1854) Tr. William Kingdon Clifford, as quoted by A. D'Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought from Newton to Einstein https://archive.org/details/TheEvolutionOfScientificThought (1927) p. 55.

“There are many interesting phenomena … which involve a mixture of physical phenomena and physiological processes, and the full appreciation of natural phenomena, as we see them, must go beyond physics in the usual sense. We make no apologies for making these excursions into other fields, because the separation of fields, as we have emphasized, is merely a human convenience, and an unnatural thing. Nature is not interested in our separations, and many of the interesting phenomena bridge the gaps between fields.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume I; lecture 35, "Color Vision"; 35-1 "The human eye"; p. 35-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

“The number of different optical phenomena has become in our time so great that caution must be taken so as to avoid being deceived, and also to refer the phenomena to the simple laws.”

Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) German optical physicist

In The Wave Theory, Light and Spectra. Prismatic and Diffraction Spectra. Memoirs by Joseph Von Fraunhofer (1981), p. 14 ISBN 0-405-13867-9

“Our psychology is … a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications. [It] Treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Psychology and Religion: West and East (1958), p. 476, as cited in Psychotherapy East and West (1961), p. 14

“We define law, using the word in the philosophic sense, as the constant relation discoverable in a series of phenomena.”

Michel Bréal (1832–1915) French philologist

Source: Essai de semantique, 1897, p. 11

“We are strange phenomena to ourselves, when we will stop to gaze at ourselves; but that I do not believe in; there are pleasanter subjects, and self is a mere speck on the great horizon of life.”

Lucy Larcom (1824–1893) American teacher, poet, author

Journal entry (2 March 1861), Ch. 5 : The Beginning of the War.
Lucy Larcom : Life, Letters, and Diary (1895)
Context: What does cause depression of spirits? Heavy head and heavy heart, and no sufficient reason for either, that I know of. I am out of doors every day, and have nothing unusual to trouble me; yet every interval of thought is clouded; there is no rebound, no rejoicing as it is my nature to rejoice, and as all things teach me to do. We are strange phenomena to ourselves, when we will stop to gaze at ourselves; but that I do not believe in; there are pleasanter subjects, and self is a mere speck on the great horizon of life.

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

W. Ross Ashby26

Related quotes

Related topics