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A basic place for quotations and references that I find interesting and useful...
NB inclusion in this section does not imply that I agree with the sentiments or views expressed within the quote. I may include because I feel that it succinctly describes a particular idea interestingly, provocatively, well, etc...
Have you ever seen those pictures produced by computers, the object known as the Mandelbrot set? It's as if you are traveling to some distant world. You turn on your sensing device and see this incredibly complicated configuration, with all sorts of structure to it, and you try to figure out what it is. You might think it is some extraordinary landscape or perhaps some kind of creature with lots of little babies all over the place, babies that are almost but not quite the same as the creature itself. Very elaborate and impressive! Yet just from seeing the equations, nobody had the remotest conception that they would produce patterns of this nature. Now these landscapes aren't conjured up out of someone's imagination; everyone sees the same pattern. You're exploring something with a computer, but it's not dissimilar from exploring something with experimental apparatus.
Roger Penrose, interview in Omni (June 1986), quoted in Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers, Martin Gardner, (1989)
The combinatorial immensity of thinkable structures is found in many spheres of human activity. The young John Stuart Mill was alarmed to discover that the finite number of musical notes, together witht the maximum practical length of a musical piece, meant that the world would soon run out of melodies. At the time he sank into this melancholy, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky had not yet been born, to say nothing of the entire genres of ragtime, jazz, Broadway musicals, electric blues, country and western, rock and roll, samba, reggae and punk. We are unlikely to have a melody shortage anytime soon because music is combinatorial: if each note of a melody can be selected from, say, eight notes on average, there are 64 pairs of notes, 512 motifs of three notes, 4,096 phrases of four notes, and so on, multiplying out to trillions and trillions of musical pieces.
How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker, Allen Lane (1998)
Why, then, had the fragments of the puzzle not hitherto been assembled into a coherent whole?The answers to these questions, we realised, lay in our own age and the modes of habits of thought which characterise it. Since the so-called 'enlightenment' of the eighteenth century, the orientation of Western culture and consciousness had been towards analysis, rather than synthesis. As a result, our age is one of ever-increasing specialisation. In accordance with this tendency, modern scholarship lays inordinate emphasis on specialisation - which, as the modern university attests, implies and entails the segregation of knowledge into distinct 'disciplines'. In consequence, the diverse spheres covered by our inquiry have traditionally been segmented into quite separate compartments. In each compartment the relevant material has been duly explored and evaluated by specialists, or 'experts' in the field. But few, if any, of these 'experts' have endeavoured to establish a connection between their particular field and others that may overlap it. Indeed such 'experts' tend generally to regard fields other than their own with considerable suspicion - spurious at worst, at best irrelevant. And eclectic or 'interdisciplinary' research is often actively discouraged as being, among other things, too speculative.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, Cape, 1982