Sten F. Odenwald Quotes

“Quantum fluctuations are, at their root, completely a-causal, in the sense that cause and effect and ordering of events in time is not a part of how these fluctuations work. Because of this, there seem not to be any correlations built into these kinds of fluctuations because 'law' as we understand the term requires some kind of cause-and-effect structure to pre-exist. Quantum fluctuations can precede physical law, but it seems that the converse is not true. So in the big bang, the establishment of 'law' came after the event itself, but of course even the concept of time and causality may not have been quite the same back then as they are now.”

“Your emotions are meant to fluctuate, just like your blood pressure is meant to fluctuate. It’s a system that’s supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. That’s how the system guides you through the world.”

“Recently, the search for what he calls "the splinters that make up different attention problems" has taken Castellanos in a new direction. First, he explains that your brain is far less concerned with your brilliant ideas or searing emotions than with its own internal "gyroscopic busyness," which consumes 65 percent of its total energy. Every fifty seconds, its activity fluctuates, causing what he calls a "brownout." No one knows the purpose of these neurological events, but Castellanos has a thesis: the clockwork pulses enable the brain's circuits to stay "logged on" and available to communicate with one another, even when they're not being used. "Imagine you're a cabdriver on your day off," Castellanos says. "You don't need to use your workday circuits on a Sunday, but to keep those channels open, your brain sends a ping through them every minute or so. The fluctuations are the brain's investment in maintaining its circuits online.”

“The eternal difference between right and wrong does not fluctuate, it is immutable.”

“Have you noticed how vocabularies fluctuate in order to cope with our need to justify ourselves?”

“My weight fluctuates depending on my mood and my current devotion to my fitness routine.”

“With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness.”

“My courage and my resolution is firm; but my hopes fluctuate, and my spirits are often depressed.”

“The things we fear most in organizations-fluctuations disturbances imbalances-are the primary sources of creativity.”

“The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops.”