This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works (Edge Question Series)

Much of the local research in experimental biology, in spite of its seemingly “scientific” and evidentiary attributes, fails a simple test of mathematical rigor. This means we need to be careful of what conclusions we can and cannot make about what we see, no matter how locally robust it seems. It is impossible, because of the curse of dimensionali

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“In equilibrium systems, everything adds up nicely and linearly. It is trivial to generalize to many agents; this simply corresponds to connecting more glasses of water. The effect on the water level from adding several drops of water is proportional to the number of drops. One does not have to think about the individual drops. In physics, we refer

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It seems that, from the perspective of mathematical science, there exist two natural domains. The first is the physical domain of particles, fields, and universal laws, with an associated search for elegant theories that apply everywhere in the known universe. Here, science has made great strides. The second domain is that of complex phenomena. The

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As a new point of view we turn to bounded rationality, a departure from the mainstream tradition. We no longer can assume that every agent is a perfect calculator. This point of view is given a great deal of emphasis by Herbert Simon. Simon argued that people do not maximize. When they’re forecasting the future, they do not perform the task of rati

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