For most of human history, the things we couldn't explain, we called mystical. The movement of stars, the trajectories of projectiles, the behavior of gases. Then, over the course of a few centuries, we pulled these phenomena into the domain of human inquiry. We called it science.
What's remarkable, in retrospect, is how terse those explanations turned out to be. F=ma. E=mc². PV=nRT.
The universe, or at least vast swaths of it, submitted to compression ratios that seem almost unreasonable. You could capture the behavior of every falling object on Earth in three variables and describe the relationship between matter and energy in five characters.
The deepest truths fit on a napkin.
They had to. When your tools are pencils, chalkboards, and human working memory, a theory has to be small or you can't use it. The decompression happens in a human brain in real time. So theories needed to be not just correct, but operable at human scale. A physicist scribbling equations on paper needs to be able to hold the model in her head while she works through implications.
And so we developed an implicit belief that good theories are small. If a theory was elegant, we learned to trust it. If you couldn't express it concisely, you probably didn't understand it well enough.
This worked extraordinarily well for a certain class of problems. Call them the complicated.
A complicated system is one with many parts that interact in structured ways, but that ultimately yields to decomposition. A jet engine is complicated, and so are orbital mechanics and the circuit board in your laptop. You can break these systems into components, study each one, and reassemble your understanding into a coherent picture. The picture might be intricate, but it is, in principle, completable.
The Enlightenment and its intellectual descendants gave us a powerful toolkit for taming the complicated. And then we made the natural mistake of assuming that toolkit would scale to everything.
The Complex
... continue reading