Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Such self-organizing structures are ubiquitous in nature, said Prigogine. A laser is a self-organizing system in which particles of light, photons, can spontaneously group themselves into a single powerful beam that has every photon moving in lockstep. A hurricane is a self-organizing system powered by the steady stream of energy coming in from the sun, which drives the winds and draws rainwater from the oceans. A living cell—although much too complicated to analyze mathematically—is a self-organizing system that survives by taking in energy in the form of food and excreting energy in the form of heat and waste. In fact, wrote Prigogine in one article, it's conceivable that the economy is a self-organizing system, in which market structures are spontaneously organized by such things as the demand for labor and the demand for goods and services.