The Santa Fe Institute has launched an ambitious project in which leading complexity scientists comment on “foundational” papers. However, many of them are not foundational in the sense that they started a line of research that led to the complexity science of today; some of them are even foundational for lines of research that are rather distinct from complexity science. I […]
Category: complex systems
The holistic tribes
This blog post is hopefully the beginning of the lecture notes for an upcoming course. Ultimately, I want to rectify the story of the development of ideas around complex systems, which has neither been a steady and well-informed progression nor a succession of Kuhnian paradigm shifts, but rather something messy and disconnected: a story of […]
Dissipative delusions
Lately, I’ve been reading books and papers of, and about, Ilya Prigogine, and here’s a little report. [1] I have always been fascinated by cult leaders. The way they create wallless echo chambers—where what they say resonates with the minds of their followers. It feels unbelievable that I would fall for such rhetoric. How could […]
Women pioneers II
One of my most-read blog posts is this one, where I highlighted some trailblazing women scientists—Helen Jennings, Klara von Neumann, Mary Tsingou, Helen Abby, Miriam Kretzschmar, and Fan Chung Graham—in fields related to network science and computational social science. In the eight years since that post, I learned about more, and now is the time […]
A better way of thinking about emergence
In this armchair-philosophy blog post, I’ll argue that we need to talk about emergence with scientific detachment, and one way of doing that would be to emphasize its role in explanation rather than as a phenomenon in itself. The eye of the beholder, after all The wonder of life itself is the wonder of emergence. […]
The quiet revolution: When complex left networks
Soon after networks became all the rage among statistical physicists, the field turned away from the home turf of complex systems science. This blog post argues for considering network science as distinct from complexity science. All is sketchy and subjective (from the viewpoint of a statistical physicist jumping on the complex-networks bandwagon). I can think […]
Complexity science in the name of politics: a travel diary
This is a reading diary of a naïve complexity / computational social scientist’s first encounter with F. A. Hayek + Eastern Bloc tektology & cybernetics. You might have heard about project Cybersyn? In 1970s Chile, Salvador Allende’s socialist regime was betting on a systems-theoretical approach to the complex decision-making that’s an inevitable consequence of a […]
The golden era of complexity science books
Here is a list of complexity science books in a popular science style from when the hype was the biggest—from 1987 and a decade further*—and some very brief comments. Several of them are available at archive.org, as linked below. I’m pretty sure I forgot a few. If so, I’ll add them later. * I’m no […]
Intro video to the history and ideas of complexity science and networks
I needed a video presenting the historical development of ideas behind the complexity and network science in 20 minutes—an impossible task of course (especially since I couldn’t spend too much time on prepping it). Anyway, someone out there could be interested, so here it is: Some credits not stated in the video: The starling murmuration […]
Emergence: Profoundly trivial
This post is an echo of voices from the distant past, prompted by a tweet by Fernando Rosas. (It’s also not entirely fact-checked and somewhat tongue-in-cheek.) Emergence is trivial! Emergence is what makes it possible to have different levels of description. Biologists can discuss cells; medical scientists can talk about tissues made of millions of […]
Petter Holme 