What captivated him wasn’t that science allowed you to reduce everything in the universe to a few simple laws. It was just the opposite: that science showed you how a few simple laws could produce the enormously rich behavior of the world. “It really delights me,” he says. “Science and math are the ultimate in reduction in one sense. But if you turn them on their heads, and look at the synthetic aspects, the possibilities for surprise are just unending. It’s a way of making the universe comprehensible at one end and forever incomprehensible at the other end.”
