Deep Simplicity

In this brilliantly enlightening book, John Gribbin, the man who made quantum theory clear with In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, shows that complexity is simple, and explains how life has emerged from simple systems. Deep Simplicity is the first book to synthesise all the various ideas about chaos and complexity—from the butterfly effect to the intriguing concept of Gaia. It reveals that at the root of even what seems to be the most random behaviour, there are actually simple laws of cause and effect—essentially the same ones discovered by Newton 300 years ago. But the sensitive way in which systems respond to those basic laws, combined with feedback, can explain why, for example, just one vehicle braking on a motorway can cause a traffic jam; how a tiny genetic mutation or environmental change may make a species develop in a wholly different way; or why wild weather fluctuations can result from a slight change in atmospheric pressure. It can even explain people, the most complex systems of all, showing how we evolved from the most widely available raw materials in the Universe.