From the time of Galileo (in round numbers, the beginning of the seventeenth century) science made progress – enormous progress – largely by ignoring these complexities, and focusing on the simple questions, looking to explain why apples fall to the ground, and why the Sun rises in the east.
Progress was so spectacular, indeed, that by about the middle of the twentieth century all the simple questions had been answered.
And yet, the complexity of the world at the human level – at the level of life – remained. The most interesting question of all, the question of how life could have emerged from non-life, remained unanswered.
It is no surprise that the most complex features of the Universe, which proved most reluctant to yield to the traditional methods of scientic investigation, should exist on our scale. Indeed, we may be the most complex things there are in the Universe.
An atom, or even a simple molecule like water, is simpler than a human being because it has little internal structure; a star, or the interior of a planet, is simpler than a human being because gravity crushes any structure out of existence.
As we shall see, although some valiant individual assaults on these puzzles had been made earlier, it only really became possible to begin to understand the workings of the world on the complex human scale in the 1960s, with the advent of powerful and fast (by the standards of those days) electronic computers. These new developments began to emerge into the awareness of a wider public in the middle to late 1980s, with the publication rst of the now classic book Order out of Chaos, by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, and then of James Gleick’s Chaos.
So I asked the cleverest person I know, Jim Lovelock, if I was on the right lines. Was it really true, I asked, that all this business of chaos and complexity is based on two simple ideas – the sensitivity of a system to its starting conditions, and feedback? Yes, he replied, that’s all there is to it.
As we hope to convince you, the study of chaos and the emergence of complexity from simple systems is now on the brink of explaining the origin of life itself.
And it is the simplicity that underpins complexity that is the theme of this book.
