More and more over the past decade, he’d begun to sense that the old reductionist approaches were reaching a dead end, and that even some of the hard-core physical scientists were getting fed up with mathematical abstractions that ignored the real complexities of the world. They seemed to be half-consciously groping for a new approach—and in the process, he thought, they were cutting across the traditional boundaries in a way they hadn’t done in years. Maybe centuries.
