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Cited by 410

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

Waldrop, M. Mitchell, Stein, Daniel·1992·Physics Today
DOI 10.1063/1.2809917
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Abstract

In a rented convent in Santa Fe, a revolution has been brewing. The activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics such as Murray Gell-Mann and Kenneth Arrow, and pony-tailed graduate students, mathematicians, and computer scientists down from Los Alamos. They've formed an iconoclastic think tank called the Santa Fe Institute, and their radical idea is to create a new science called complexity. These mavericks from academe share a deep impatience with the kind of linear, reductionist thinking that has dominated science since the time of Newton. Instead, they are gathering novel ideas about interconnectedness, coevolution, chaos, structure, and order - and they're forging them into an entirely new, unified way of thinking about nature, human social behavior, life, and the universe itself. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell - and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. They want to know why ancient ecosystems often remained stable for millions of years, only to vanish in a geological instant - and what such events have to do with the sudden collapse of Soviet communism in the late 1980s. They want to know why the economy can behave in unpredictable ways that economists can't explain - and how the random process of Darwinian natural selection managed to produce such wonderfully intricate structu…

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  • There is an optimal point in a system when stabilizing and destabilizing forces are in a form of dynamic balance, at which conditions are created for the system to be at its most creative and to promote optimal learning and adaptation.

    “Both Grobman (2005) and Waldrop (1992) point out that there is an optimal point in a system when stabilizing and destabilizing forces are in a form of dynamic balance.”

    From What Does It Take to Implement Change Successfully? A Study of the Behaviors of Successful Change Leaders (2011) · cites this paper as Waldrop, 1992

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Authors
Waldrop, M. M., & Stein, D.
Affiliations
University of Arizona
Venue
Physics Today
Publisher
AIP Publishing
Published
1992-12-01
Volume
45
Issue
12
Pages
83-83
ISSN
  • 0031-9228
  • 1945-0699
DOI
10.1063/1.2809917
Cited by
410
References
0
Language
en

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