Sublime

The laws of thermodynamics seem to dictate the opposite, that nature should inexorably degenerate toward a state of greater disorder, greater entropy. Yet all around us we see magnificent structures—galaxies, cells, ecosystems, human beings—that have somehow managed to assemble themselves.

William Buckley, the archconservative, and Arthur Schlesinger, a highly credentialed liberal, were arguing one day on Buckley’s TV show about America’s budget deficits. They disagreed about nearly everything. The one notion they concurred on enthusiastically was that bureaucratic agencies—such as government departments—mindlessly and inexorably att

California Institute of Technology’s John Hopfield

Wiener was as worldly as Shannon was reticent. He was well traveled and polyglot, ambitious and socially aware; he took science personally and passionately. His expression of the second law of thermodynamics, for example, was a cry of the heart: We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to

there was around a 40 per cent turnover in network membership (technically known as ‘churn’) over the eighteen months that we had been tracking them.

Both are dynamic systems in which the selfish actions of countless individuals—whether they be cells or investors—lead to unpredictable consequences at the system level. In turn, these collective actions and consequences feed back to influence individual actions in endless cycles of adaptation and evolution.

in general, an introductory textbook on probability is Richard Isaac’s The Pleasures of Probability.9

Trust, which is an essential form of social capital, is the “glue” needed to form and maintain large networks. It is different from the knowledge and knowhow that we accumulate in these networks.9