I have so far confessed to two problems in the notion of chains of explanation that lead down to final laws: the intrusion of historical accidents and the complexity that prevents our being actually able to explain everything even when we consider only universals, free of the element of history. There is one other problem that must be confronted, one associated with the buzzword “emergence.” As we look at nature at levels of greater and greater complexity, we see phenomena emerging that have no counterpart at the simpler levels, least of all at the level of the elementary particles.
