Quotes about gradient

A collection of quotes on the topic of gradient, time, living, timing.

Quotes about gradient

“From behind the snow-capped mountains, hidden under the veil of brume, the sun prepared to rise. It took time to climb those lofty peaks with precipitous gradients. In the valley below lay a sleepy little town.”

Surendra Pratap Singh (1948–1997) Indian journalist

Parrot Under the Pine Tree

Mountain, Time, Sun

“[The loss- of-strength gradient is] the degree to which military and political power diminishes as we move a unit distance away from its home base.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

According to Marike Finlay (1987) Powermatics: A Discursive Critique of New Technology. p. 200 with this statement "Kenneth Boulding has shown, the extent of control is a function of loss-of-strength gradient of a political centre."
Source: 1960s, Conflict and defense: A general theory, 1962, p. 245

“As I thought about this, I noted that the bacterium is just a physical system; it's just a bunch of molecules that hang together and do things to one another. So, I wondered, what characteristics are necessary for a physical system to be an autonomous agent? After thinking about this for a number of months I came up with a tentative definition.
My definition is that an autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time.”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

The Adjacent Possible: A Talk with Stuart Kauffman, 2003

Business, Thinking, Time

“In his famous book, What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger asks, "What is the source of the order in biology?" He arrives at the idea that it depends upon quantum mechanics and a microcode carried in some sort of aperiodic crystal—which turned out to be DNA and RNA—so he is brilliantly right. But if you ask if he got to the essence of what makes something alive, it's clear that he didn't. Although today we know bits and pieces about the machinery of cells, we don't know what makes them living things. However, it is possible that I've stumbled upon a definition of what it means for something to be alive.
For the better part of a year and a half, I've been keeping a notebook about what I call autonomous agents. An autonomous agent is something that can act on its own behalf in an environment. Indeed, all free-living organisms are autonomous agents. Normally, when we think about a bacterium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient we say that the bacterium is going to get food. That is to say, we talk about the bacterium teleologically, as if it were acting on its own behalf in an environment. It is stunning that the universe has brought about things that can act in this way. How in the world has that happened?”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

The Adjacent Possible: A Talk with Stuart Kauffman, 2003

Life, Books, World, Food

“It is less important, I believe, where you start. It is more important how and what you learn. If the quality of the learning is high, the development gradient is steep, and, given time, you can find yourself in a previously unattainable place.”

N. R. Narayana Murthy (1946) Indian businessman

Life lessons from Narayana Murthy (2013)

“Gradually… during the second half of the nineteenth century, the uncomfortable feeling of dislike of the action at a distance, which had been so strong in Huygens and other contemporaries of Newton, but had subsided during the eighteenth century, began to emerge again, and gained strength rapidly.
This was favoured by the purely mathematical transformation (which can be compared in a sense with that from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system), replacing Newton's finite equations by the differential equations, the potential becoming the primary concept, instead of the force, which is only the gradient of the potential. These ideas, of course, arose first in the theory of electricity and magnetism or perhaps one should say in the brain of Faraday.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932)

Feeling, Mathematics, Idea, Sense

“Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1960s, Through the Vanishing Point (1968)

“The essential condition for life is the existence of sharp energy gradients.”

Stephen Baxter book Raft

Source: Raft (1991), Chapter 15 (p. 151)

“I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.”

David Pearce (philosopher) (1959) British transhumanist

Quoted in Ethics Matters (2012) by Peter and Charlotte Vardy, p. 114 ISBN 978-0334043911

World, Animals, Suffering