The terms complexity, complex adaptive systems, and sciences of complexity are found often in recent scientific literature, reflecting the remarkable growth in collaborative academic research focused on complexity from the origin and dynamics of organisms to the largest social and political organizations. One of the great challenges in this field of research is to discover which features are essential and shared by all of the seemingly disparate systems that are described as complex. Is there sufficient synthesis to suggest the possibility of an overarching science of complexity? This report describes current views on this subject held by various eminent scholars associated with the Santa Fe Institute.The physical sciences have traditionally been concerned with simple” systems whose dynamics can be described in mathematical terms with precision and certainty. In contrast, the biological and social sciences are inevitably concerned with self-organized or social complex” systems whose detailed behaviors appear to be unpredictable. The two categories differ greatly in size and diversity, prompting the late mathematician Stanislaus Ulam to remark that research on complex systems might be compared to the study of non-elephants. Nevertheless, certain integrative themes have begun to emerge.Rising activity in this field of research runs completely counter to the trend toward increasing fragmentation and specialization in the sciences. It has stimulated a resurgence of interest in a broad synthesis involving mathematics, computational science, physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, and the social sciences. The growth of effort in this very extended field has been greatly stimulated by the development of new computational tools that are capable of dealing with vast, interrelated databases. Many of the participants in complexity research feel that it is now time to reintegrate the fragmented interests of much of the academic community. The reader is encouraged to consider whether such views are sparking a historic renaissance of scholarship or represent a passing scientific diversion.

Complexity: Metaphors, Models, And Reality (Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Proceedings)

Science & Math

Cowan, George A.

History & Philosophy

CRC-Press

Complexity Metaphors, Models, and Reality

Pines, David

Meltzer, David

Evolution

Westview Press

Complexity: Metaphors, Models, and Reality

The telephone lay in pieces on George Cowan's office desk in the basement of Princeton's physics building. It was his first day as a graduate student in the fall of 1941. Down the hall, on the door of the cyclotron control room, a sign warned, "Don't let Dick Feynman in. He takes tools." On that day, the future Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman needed a piece from his new office mate's phone, so he borrowed it without even introducing himself.
Cowan's memoir is an engaging eyewitness account of how science works and how scientists, as human beings, work as well. In discussing his career in nuclear physics from the 1940s into the 1980s, Cowan weaves in intriguing anecdotes about a large cast of distinguished scientists--all related in his wry, self-deprecating manner.
Besides his nearly forty-year career at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Cowan also helped establish banks in Los Alamos and Santa Fe, served as treasurer of the group that created the Santa Fe Opera, and in the late 1980s participated in founding the Santa Fe Institute and served as its first president. He anchored its interdisciplinary work in his quest to find "common ground between the relatively simple world of natural science and the daily, messy world of human affairs."
Since the early 1990s Cowan has pursued a new interest in psychology and neuroscience to gain a deeper understanding of patterns of human behavior.
This autobiography will appeal to anyone interested in a concise, intellectually engaged account of science and its place in society and public policy over the past seventy years.

Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute: The Memoirs of George A. Cowan

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

University of New Mexico Press

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