“The amazing thing is that chaotic systems don't always stay chaotic," Ben said, leaning on the gate. "Sometimes they spontaneously reorganize themselves into an orderly structure.""They suddenly become less chaotic?" I said, wishing that would happen at HiTek."No, that's the thing. They become more and more chaotic until they reach some sort of chaotic critical mass. When that happens, they spontaneously reorganize themselves at a higher equilibrium level. It's called self-organized criticality.”

“Don't they know science doesn't work like that? You can't just order scientific breakthroughs. They happen when you are looking at something you've been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when you're looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Don't they know you can't get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one?”

“Some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic.”

“Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.”

“The more Chaotic I am, the more complete I am.”

“It's that undefined something we're really afraid of-the flicker of movement we don't quite catch out of the corner of our eye, the bad dream we can't quite remember when we wake up, the sound of a door opening downstairs we thought we heard. And worst of all, the things we're not sure even happened, the things that we might just have imagined, that might mean we're going mad, all those nameless, nebulous things we can't quite put our finger on and can only guess at.”

“We know our lives are chaotic, but we insist that everything happen in an orderly way and be logically conceived.”