Sublime

The role of luck, therefore, appears decisive.

Studies of the dynamics of networks have mushroomed recently. They became popular with Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, in which he shows how some of the behaviors of variables such as epidemics spread extremely fast beyond some unspecified critical level.

Randomness can make placebos seem like miracle cures, or harmless compounds appear to be deadly poisons, and can even create subatomic particles out of nothing.

Waldrop, Mitchell M. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

This paradox of comprehension was articulated explicitly by a great physicist of an earlier age: “Sir Isaac Newton, when asked what he thought of the infatuations of the people, answered that he could calculate the motions of erratic bodies, but not the madness of a multitude” (quoted from The Church of England Quarterly Review, 1850).

According to the power law theory, certain efforts actually produce exponentially more results than others.

Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?

Nature normally hates power laws. In ordinary systems all quantities follow bell curves, and correlations decay rapidly, obeying exponential laws. But all that changes if the system is forced to undergo a phase transition. Then power laws emerge—nature’s unmistakable sign that chaos is departing in favor of order.