Sublime

Gogolook

This sort of duality, what the physicist Didier Sornette calls “the fight between order and disorder,”99 is common in complex systems, which are those governed by the interaction of many separate individual parts.

The economy is not a closed static equilibrium system; it is a system perpetually open to novel behavior, and complexity economics forces us to keep this in mind.

Complex systems science is different. It seeks order by understanding how simple parts, interacting together and perhaps adapting to one another, create an entirely new whole. The

Self-organization is the life force of the world, thriving on the edge of chaos with just enough order to funnel its energy, but not so much as to slow down adaptation and learning.

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).