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

Indeed, except for the very simplest physical systems, virtually everything and everybody in the world is caught up in a vast, nonlinear web of incentives and constraints and connections. The slightest change in one place causes tremors everywhere else. We can't help but disturb the universe, as T.S. Eliot almost said. The whole is almost always eq... See more

Every one of these questions refers to a system that is complex, in the sense that a great many independent agents are interacting with each other in a great many ways [...] the very richness of these interactions allows the system as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization. Thus, people trying to satisfy their material needs unconsciously... See more

Is the cosmic compulsion for disorder matched by an equally powerful compulsion for order, structure, and organization?