Some of the issues in the debate over reductionism within physics have been usefully raised by the author James Gleick. (It was Gleick who introduced the physics of chaos to a general readership.) In a recent talk he argued: Chaos is anti-reductionist. This new science makes a strong claim about the world: namely, that when it comes to the most interesting questions, questions about order and disorder, decay and creativity, pattern formation and life itself, the whole cannot be explained in terms of the parts. There are fundamental laws about complex systems, but they are new kinds of laws.
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