But the fascination with complexity went still deeper than that, says Cowan. In part because of their computer simulations, and in part because of new mathematical insights, physicists had begun to realize by the early 1980s that a lot of messy, complicated systems could be described by a powerful theory known as “nonlinear dynamics.” And in the process, they had been forced to face up to a disconcerting fact: the whole really can be greater than the sum of its parts.
