
Complexity
The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
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Narrated by:
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Mikael Naramore
About this listen
“If you liked Chaos, you’ll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post).
In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell--and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today.
This book is their story--the story of how they have tried to forge what they like to call the science of the 21st century.
“Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal discoveries are just around the corner...[Waldrop] has a special talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual insight.” (The New York Times Book Review)
“Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology, genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and there almost took your breath away.” (Medium)
“[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science.” (Publishers Weekly)
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
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Don't buy - visual examples missing, no pdf
- By Richard Pickett on 08-26-19
By: Donald Hoffman
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The Information
- A History, a Theory, a Flood
- By: James Gleick
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: A revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality - the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born.
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Brilliant book, heroic reader, better in print?
- By A reader on 03-12-11
By: James Gleick
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The Science of Information: From Language to Black Holes
- By: Benjamin Schumacher, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Benjamin Schumacher
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Original Recording
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The Science of Information: From Language to Black Holes covers the exciting concepts, history, and applications of information theory in 24 challenging and eye-opening half-hour lectures taught by Professor Benjamin Schumacher of Kenyon College. A prominent physicist and award-winning educator at one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges, Professor Schumacher is also a pioneer in the field of quantum information, which is the latest exciting development in this dynamic scientific field.
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Not appropriate for audio-only
- By Katz-Mulvey Family on 03-12-19
By: Benjamin Schumacher, and others
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Scale
- The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
- By: Geoffrey West
- Narrated by: Bruce Mann
- Length: 19 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term complexity can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities, and our businesses.
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Not for a scientific reader
- By UUbu on 10-30-17
By: Geoffrey West
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Thinking in Systems
- A Primer
- By: Donella H. Meadows
- Narrated by: Tia Rider Sorensen
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In the years following her role as the lead author of the international best seller, Limits to Growth - the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet - Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem-solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world....
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Skip to the Middle
- By John Chambers on 06-20-20
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Life as No One Knows It
- The Physics of Life's Emergence
- By: Sara Imari Walker
- Narrated by: Sara Imari Walker
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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What is life? This is among the most difficult open problems in science, right up there with the nature of consciousness and the existence of matter. All the definitions we have fall short. None help us understand how life originates or the full range of possibilities for what life on other planets might look like. In Life as No One Knows It, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker argues that solving the origin of life requires radical new thinking and an experimentally testable theory for what life is.
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Fascinating thought patterns
- By John linden on 09-10-24
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Against the Gods
- The Remarkable Story of Risk
- By: Peter L. Bernstein
- Narrated by: Mike Fraser
- Length: 14 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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In this unique exploration of the role of risk in our society, Peter Bernstein argues that the notion of bringing risk under control is one of the central ideas that distinguishes modern times from the distant past. Against the Gods chronicles the remarkable intellectual adventure that liberated humanity from oracles and soothsayers by means of the powerful tools of risk management that are available to us today.
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Glad it finally got here
- By bda31175 on 10-16-21
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The Wild Places
- By: Robert Macfarlane
- Narrated by: Simon Bubb
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? Or have we tarmacked, farmed and built ourselves out of wildness? In his vital, bewitching, inspiring classic, Robert Macfarlane sets out in search of the wildness that remains.
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Magical
- By Jennifer on 01-27-22
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The Heartbeat of Trees
- Embracing Our Ancient Bond with Forests and Nature
- By: Peter Wohlleben
- Narrated by: Mike Grady
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Heartbeat of Trees, renowned forester Peter Wohlleben draws on new scientific discoveries to show how humans are deeply connected to the natural world. In an era of climate change, many of us fear we’ve lost our connection to nature - but Peter Wohlleben is convinced that age-old ties linking humans to the forest remain alive and intact. We just have to know where to look.
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More the Heartbeat of the author
- By Woodworker on 11-17-21
By: Peter Wohlleben
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Space Oddities
- The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe
- By: Harry Cliff
- Narrated by: Harry Cliff
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Something strange is going on in the cosmos. Scientists are uncovering a catalogue of weird phenomena that simply can’t be explained by our long-established theories of the universe. After decades of fruitless searching, could we finally be catching glimpses of a profound new view of our physical world? Or are we being fooled by cruel tricks of the data? In Space Oddities, Harry Cliff, a physicist who does cutting-edge work on the Large Hadron Collider, provides a riveting look at the universe’s most confounding puzzles.
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as compelling as a mystery novel and very informative
- By jimpgh@aol.com on 04-22-24
By: Harry Cliff
Worth the read
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Amazing
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awesome
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Fascinating and Thorough
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History with a side of Science
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Very good
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old but significant
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History of complexity
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• The story of unfolding understanding
• The passion for understanding
• The accounts of learning by intuition, inspiration, relentless inquiry, patient pondering, communal interests / intuitions
• The science itself
• Seeming universality of the science and explication of associated conditions
• The characters so to speak tho’ very real people
Dislikes:
• Just one. I’d devote less space / time on administrative troubles eg funding and leadership. Inclusion is important but the same degree of thoroughness wasn’t as interesting / useful (to me)
Historically Thorough
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Having studied physics at that time I can very well relate to the excitement around fractals, chaos and complex systems.
What I find difficult to follow was this stream of names and the who met whom and when and why.
Complex as the field, with so many connections that a small change in the initial conditions could have had a complete different outcome for the field of complexity
Complex or complicated
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