From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Nature can always be more complicated than we imagine.
To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.
The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
And so from that, I've always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity.
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.
We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.
Let us think of Nature as a builder, making all that we see out of atoms of a limited number of kinds, just as the builder of a house constructs it out of so many different kinds of things: bricks, slates, planks, panes of glass, and so on.
Understanding reduces the greatest to simplicity, and lack of its causes the least to take on the magnitude.
Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.