Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

the complete dynamics and structure of complex adaptive systems cannot be encoded in a small number of equations. Indeed, in most cases, probably not even in an infinite number. Furthermore, predictions to arbitrary degrees of accuracy are not possible, even in principle.

we should recognize that it cannot literally explain and predict everything.

Among its founding fathers were two other major figures of twentieth-century academia, both Nobel laureates: Philip Anderson, a condensed matter physicist from Princeton University who had worked on superconductivity and was an inventor, among many other things, of the mechanism of symmetry breaking that underlies the prediction of the Higgs particle; and Kenneth Arrow from Stanford University, whose many contributions to the fundamental underpinnings of economics, from social choice to endogenous growth theory, have been hugely influential.

The vision proposed by Anderson, and to a lesser extent by Gray, is the computer scientists’ and statisticians’ version of the Theory of Everything. It carries with it a similar arrogance and narcissism that this is the singular way to understand everything. How far it will truly reveal new science remains open to question. But when combined with the traditional scientific method, it surely will.