Complexity_ A Guided Tour - Melanie Mitchell [140]
PART V
Conclusion
I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon—his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mine the
Harvest: A Collection of New Poems
CHAPTER 19
The Past and Future of the Sciences of Complexity
IN 1995, THE SCIENCE JOURNALIST John Horgan published an article in Scientific American, arguably the world’s leading popular science magazine, attacking the field of complex systems in general and the Santa Fe Institute in particular. His article was advertised on the magazine’s cover under the label “Is Complexity a Sham?” (figure 19.1).
The article contained two main criticisms. First, in Horgan’s view, it was unlikely that the field of complex systems would uncover any useful general principles, and second, he believed that the predominance of computer modeling made complexity a “fact-free science.” In addition, the article made several minor jabs, calling complexity “pop science” and its researchers “complexologists.” Horgan speculated that the term “complexity” has little meaning but that we keep it for its “public-relations value.”
To add insult to injury, Horgan quoted me as saying, “At some level you can say all complex systems are aspects of the same underlying principles, but I don’t think that will be very useful.” Did I really say this? I wondered. What was the context? Do I believe it? Horgan had interviewed me on the phone for an hour or more and I had said a lot of things; he chose the single most negative comment to use in his article. I hadn’t had very much experience with science journalists at that point and I felt really burned.
I wrote an angry, heartfelt letter to the editor at Scientific American, listing all the things I thought were wrong and unfair in Horgan’s article. Of course a dozen or more of my colleagues did the same; the magazine published only one of these letters and it wasn’t mine.
FIGURE 19.1. Complexity is “dissed” on the cover of Scientific American. (Cover art by Rosemary Volpe, reprinted by permission.)
The whole incident taught me some lessons. Mostly, be careful what you say to journalists. But it did force me to think harder and more carefully about the notion of “general principles” and what this notion might mean.
Horgan’s article grew into an equally cantankerous book, called The End of Science, in which he proposed that all of the really important discoveries of science have already been made, and that humanity would make no more. His Scientific American article on complexity was expanded into a chapter, and included the following pessimistic prediction: “The fields of chaos, complexity, and artificial life will continue…. But they will not achieve any great insights into nature—certainly none comparable to Darwin’s theory of evolution or quantum mechanics.”
Is Horgan right in any sense? Is it futile to aim for the discovery of general principles or a “unified theory” covering all complex systems?
On Unified Theories and General Principles
The term unified theory (or Grand Unified Theory, quaintly abbreviated as GUT) usually refers to a goal of physics: to have a single theory that unifies the basic forces in the universe. String theory is one attempt at a GUT, but there is no consensus in physics that string theory works or even if a GUT exists.
Imagine that string theory turns out to be correct—physics’ long sought-after GUT. That would be an enormously important achievement, but it would not be the end of science, and in particular it would be far from the end of complex systems science. The