About this Book

Casti explores several types of phenomena that have, until now, consistently eluded science's attempts to understand them: the catastrophic, where a tiny change in a system produces a huge effect (as happens in earthquakes or political revolutions); the chaotic, which includes odd correlations like the ones that make predicting the weather or the stock market so difficult; paradox, in which you follow a commonsense rule and still something weird happens (the more lanes you add to the freeway, for example, the bigger the traffic jams); the irreducible, where, as in novels, symphonies and baseball games, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the emergent, in which a pattern, like life itself, seems to arise from out of nowhere.