Frontiers Of Complexity

Frontiers of Complexity

"SCIENCE JOURNALISM AT ITS BEST. . . An impeccably researched, amazingly up-to-date, crisply written and well-illustrated survey." --Nature At the cutting edge of the sciences, a dynamic new concept is emerging: complexity. In this groundbreaking new book, Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield explore how complexity in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and even the social sciences is transforming not only the way we think about the universe, but also the very assumptions that underlie conventional science. Complexity is a watchword for a new way of thinking about the behavior of interacting units, whether they are atoms, ants in a colony, or neurons firing in a human brain. The rise of the electronic computer provided both the key and the catalyst to our exploration of complexity. A new generation of computers that runs on light and exploits the bizarre properties of quantum mechanics promises to deepen our understanding still further. The advances we have already witnessed are spectacular. The authors take us inside laboratories where scientists are evolving the genetic molecules that enabled life to emerge on earth and generating universes teeming with virtual creatures in cyber-space. We witness the utterly realistic behavior of a school of virtual fish--computer-generated replicas that have been trained to swim gracefully, hunt for food, and scatter at the approach of a leopard shark. Compelling in its clarity, far-reaching in its implications, vibrant with the excitement of new discovery, Frontiers of Complexity is an arresting account of how far science has come in the past fifty years and an essential guide to the rapidly approaching future. "[A] MARVELOUS AND COMPREHENSIVE WORK . . . Virtually any scientist or interested lay reader will find this book engrossing, edifying and inspiring." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Frontiers of Complexity

The End Of Science

As staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, and E.O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts? In The End Of Science, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be simply human, and scientists, he writes, "are rarely so human . . . so at there mercy of their fears and desires, as when they are confronting the limits of knowledge."This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final "theory of everything" that signals the end? Is the age of great discoverers behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding detains to existing theories? Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to there and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, plectics, consciousness, Neural Darwinism, Marx's view of progress, Kuhn's view of revolutions, cellular automata, robots, and the Omega Point, with Fred Hoyle, Noam Chomsky, John Wheeler, Clifford Geertz, and dozens of other eminent scholars. The resulting narrative will both infuriate and delight as it mindless Horgan's smart, contrarian argument for "endism" with a witty, thoughtful, even profound overview of the entire scientific enterprise. Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information as speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction. Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights activists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike. As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literaty criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls "ironic science." Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world's leading researchers, he offers homage too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.