This collection is about the scientific endeavor to find concise descriptions for how patterns in Nature are generated, and this is an endeavor that has taken twisted and unexpected turns
The unreasonable ubiquity of hierarchies should be suspect. Is the fact that you need a B to get from A to C – the fact that any accomplishment stands on the shoulders of giants – so trivial and arbitrary so as to be practically worthless?
“Why is reality structured at all?” was what Herbert Simon, an extraordinary polymath regarded as one of last century’s most influential thinkers, asked himself in his watchmaker parable from the article “The Architecture of Complexity” (1962).
