"If you liked Chaos, you'll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most
exciting intellectual adventure story of the year" (The Washington
Post).
In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been
brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in
physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and
computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an
iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new
science: complexity. 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.
This book is their story--the story of how they have tried to forge what
they like to call the science of the 21st century.
"Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and
economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal
discoveries are just around the corner...[Waldrop] has a special
talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual
insight." (The New York Times Book Review)
"Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of
complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology,
genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and
there almost took your breath away." (Medium)
"[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first
flowering of a new science." (Publishers Weekly)
