Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos ANNOTATION
Science magazine reporter Waldrop introduces researchers--rebellious graduate students, Nobel laureates, and pragmatic businessmen--who are formulating surprising answers to complex questions about the universe. Line drawings.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In 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. Here is the tale of Brian Arthur, the Belfast-born economist who stubbornly pushed his theories of economic ch
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Waldrop presents his narrative of the ``science of complexity in high screenplay style, offering a cast of five main characters. In general, he makes the emerging nature of complexity theory accessible to the general reader. He dissipates his advantage, however, in order to depict the personalities of the scientists he discusses, using at least three of them-Stuart Kauffman, Brian Arthur and Chris Langton-to act as interdisciplinary infielders of sorts, who relay the theory itself through a long subplot on structuring and funding the Santa Fe Institute in the 1970s. Complexity theory most likely will receive other, more rigorous examinations than Waldrop's, but he provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science. (Oct.)
Library Journal
The Santa Fe Institute is an interdisciplinary think tank that has attracted the services of an electric and brilliant group of scholars. Here, economists work with biologists and physical scientists to develop theories that, many hope, will reveal that while natural systems may operate ``at the edge of chaos,'' they are in fact self-organized. Thus conceived, the so-called science of complexity could explain the mysteries of how life began and might even predict global economic trends. The picture that emerges from this book, though, is that while many separate scientific endeavors overlap, a true conceptual synthesis is still a long way away. Waldrop writes in a very readable, sometimes overly light and chatty style, but by focusing so strongly on individual efforts, he inadvertently supports the impression that what is called the unified science of complexity is conjectural and quite fragmented. While this book succeeds as a chronicle of the Santa Fe Institute, it does not fully convince the reader that complexity represents a scientific revolution. Optional for public libraries.-- Gregg Sapp, Montana State Univ. Libs., Bozeman
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