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

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

The edge of chaos is where life has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of life.

Economics, as any historian or anthropologist could have told him instantly, was hopelessly intertwined with politics and culture.

The Eighth Day of Creation,

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Predictions are nice, if you can make them. But the essence of science lies in explanation, laying bare the fundamental mechanisms of nature.

Sound is a linear system, which is why we can hear an oboe playing over its string accompaniment and recognize them both. The sound waves intermingle and yet retain their separate identities.

thinking and information processing were fundamentally the same thing. Also known as cognitive science, this was a hot area and getting hotter. When done properly, it combined the talents of neuroscientists studying the detailed wiring of the brain, cognitive psychologists studying the second-by-second process of high-level thinking and reasoning, artificial intelligence researchers trying to model those thinking processes in a computer—even linguists studying the structure of human languages and anthropologists studying human culture.

Whenever you look at very complicated systems in physics or biology, he said, you generally find that the basic components and the basic laws are quite simple; the complexity arises because you have a great many of these simple components interacting simultaneously.

The complexity is actually in the organization—the myriad possible ways that the components of the system can interact.

once a new technology starts opening up new niches for other goods and services, the people who fill those niches have every incentive to help that technology grow and prosper. Moreover, this process is a major driving force behind the phenomenon of lock-in: the more niches that spring up dependent on a given technology, the harder it is to change that technology—until something very much better comes along.