Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and ChaosIn a rented convent in Santa Fe, a revolution has been brewing. The activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics such as Murray Gell-Mann and Kenneth Arrow, and pony-tailed graduate students, mathematicians, and computer scientists down from Los Alamos. They've formed an iconoclastic think tank called the Santa Fe Institute, and their radical idea is to create a new science called complexity. These mavericks from academe share a deep impatience with the kind of linear, reductionist thinking that has dominated science since the time of Newton. Instead, they are gathering novel ideas about interconnectedness, coevolution, chaos, structure, and order - and they're forging them into an entirely new, unified way of thinking about nature, human social behavior, life, and the universe itself. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell - and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. They want to know why ancient ecosystems often remained stable for millions of years, only to vanish in a geological instant - and what such events have to do with the sudden collapse of Soviet communism in the late 1980s. They want to know why the economy can behave in unpredictable ways that economists can't explain - and how the random process of Darwinian natural selection managed to produce such wonderfully intricate structures as the eye and the kidney. Above all, they want to know how the universe manages to bring forth complex structures such as galaxies, stars, planets, bacteria, plants, animals, and brains. There are common threads in all of these queries, and these Santa Fe scientists seek to understand them. Complexity is their story: the messy, funny, human story of how science really happens. |
Contents
VISIONS OF THE WHOLE | 9 |
The Revolt of the Old Turks | 52 |
Secrets of the Old | 99 |
You Guys Really Believe That? | 136 |
Life at the Edge of Chaos | 198 |
Peasants Under Glass | 249 |
Waiting for Carnot | 305 |
Work in Progress | 325 |
360 | |
Other editions - View all
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos M. Mitchell Waldrop Limited preview - 2019 |
Common terms and phrases
actually agents Alamos Anderson Arrow artificial intelligence autocatalytic set behavior biology boids brain building blocks Burks cell cellular automata Chris Langton classifier systems course Doyne Farmer dynamics economics economists ecosystem edge of chaos emergence equilibrium evolution exactly example fact felt genes genetic algorithm going gotten happen human idea increasing returns institute's intellectual interact John Holland kind knew learning look Los Alamos machine mathematical mind molecular molecules Murray Gell-Mann natural selection Neumann nonlinear organize patterns phase transition Phil Anderson physicists physics possible precisely predict problem produce random realized rules Santa Fe Institute says Arthur says Cowan says Farmer says Holland says Kauffman says Langton scientists seemed self-organization simple simulation started strings structure Stuart Kauffman talk theory there's things thought trying turn understand universe von Neumann universe wanted whole workshop