"The royal road to a Nobel Prize has generally been through the reductionist approach," he says—dissecting the world into the smallest and simplest pieces you can. "You look for the solution of some more or less idealized set of problems, somewhat divorced from the real world, and constrained sufficiently so that you can find a solution," he says. "And that leads to more and more fragmentation of science. Whereas the real world demands—though I hate the word—a more holistic approach." Everything affects everything else, and you have to understand that whole web of connections.
