This engrossing book documents the foundation and early years of the Santa Fe Institute, which was set up by a group of scientists who had become disillusioned with the rigid compartmentalisation of different scientific disciplines. They had a vision of a research institute where there would be no Faculties, no differentiation, no fixed areas of study, just scientists from across the board talking and sharing ideas in order to forge new approaches to seemingly intractable problems.
Of this potent brew was born groundbreaking studies into artificial life, economics, emergent properties and self-organisation. And it turned out so many seemingly-unrelated areas like these had much in common after all, leading to new, holistic ways of doing scientific research.
This book is an exciting account of the personalities, methods and discoveries involved during those early years of the Institute. We move from economics to the emergence of life to computing to chaos theory, meeting, along the way, the scientists involved (including such luminaries as Brian Arthur, George A. Cowan and Murray Gell-Mann) while getting a good idea of what their work involved and what motivated them to pursue blue-sky research in the way that they did. We also meet now-familiar concepts such as genetic algorithms, flocking behaviour and cellular automatons. But the over-riding story is how, by working together on disparate problems without the usual academic conflicts and structures in the unique environment of the Santa Fe Institute, scientists were able, for the first time, to spot deep similarities between problems which nobody had ever been able to address before - such as boom-and-bust economies, the emergence of life on this planet and the simulation of life in computers.
It is also a fascinating study of how science works, and how, during the 80s and early 90s, the Institute, struggling for money and facing scepticism from the scientific establishment, forged new sciences for the 21st century and laid the groundwork for dazzling new approaches to age-old questions. And just how important the Santa Fe Institute's early work was can be seen from the fact that there are currently two news stories on the BBC news website describing innovations that stem directly from the work of the Santa Fe pioneers.
If there is one small irritation I had with this book, it is that it darts around a little too much, switching suddenly and mid-flow from an account of one aspect of the science to a biography of the scientist involved. This tends to interrupt the narrative somewhat. But this is a minor quibble. On the plus side, at the end of the book I was left wanting to know what has happened since it was written, and where the work of the SFI has led. One can, of course, keep up with developments on the internet - the SFI website is http://www.santafe.edu/
If you are at all interested in emergence and self-organising/evolving systems, or simply wish to gain a glimpse of how innovative and brilliant scientists work, this is for you. A classic.
