The Complex World - An Introduction to the Foundations of Complexity Science

This book is a good introduction to complexity science. It covers the prefoundations, and goes through the foundational papers and books in the field. It is well structured and a good overview of the field, as it lists many of the seminal works in the field.

Notes

Complexity is a new paradigm. It is a fresh way of seeing the world. The old looked at closed, reversible, symmetry-dominated and predicatble systems, while the new looks at open, self-organizing, dissipative, uncertrain and adaptive domains. "Interestingly, the more powerful the device - the more finely grained the measurement - the less easily B can be distinguished from A. Hence reductionism in the units of analysis not only fails to explain complexity; it fails to detect it." (A being the classical, B the complex system.)

Transistor gates in the chips have a length of around 3 nanometers, that is 3 * 10^-9 meters. We have mastered their art to the point of engineering. The COVID-19 virus has a diameter of around 100 nanometers, around 10^-7 meters. But we are not anywhere close to engineering that. The difference: "The virus is an agent with an evolution-ordained function."

Complexity Science rests on four pillars: Entropy, Evolution, Dynamics and Computation. The scientists that worked on these pillars were well connected. In hindsight, we could put them in categories: Physicists, Biologists, ... - but that is probably not how they thought of themselves.

Some referenced works:

• On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Thompson, 1917