The quark and the jaguar : adventures in the simple and the complex.

Contents: Prologue: An Encounter in the Jungle -- Early Light -- Information and Crude Complexity -- RANDomness -- A Child Learning a Language -- Bacteria Developing Drug Resistence -- The Scientific Enterprise -- The Power of Theory -- What Is Fundamental? -- Simplicity and Randomness in the Quantum Mechanics Universe -- A Contemporary View of Quantum Mechanics -- Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle -- Quarks and All That: The Standard Model -- Superstring Theory: Unification at Last? -- Time's Arrow's: Forward and Backward Time -- Selection at Work in Biological Evolution and Elsewhere -- From Learning to Creative Thinking -- Superstition and Skepticism -- Adaptive and Maladaptive Schema -- Machines That Learn or Simulate Learning -- Diversities Under Threat -- Transitions to a More Sustainable World -- Afterword. Includes index.

From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes a highly personal, unifying vision of the natural world. As a theoretical physicist, Murray Gell-Mann has explored nature at its most fundamental level. His achievements include the 1969 Nobel Prize for work leading up to his discovery of the quark - the basic building block of all atomic nuclei throughout the universe. But Gell-Mann is a man of many intellectual passions, with lifelong interests in fields that seek to understand existence at its most complex: natural history, biological evolution, the history of language, and the study of creative thinking. These seemingly disparate pursuits come together in Gell-Mann's current work at the Santa Fe Institute, where scientists are investigating the similarities and differences among complex adaptive systems - systems that learn or evolve by utilizing acquired information. They include a child learning his or her native language, a strain of bacteria becoming resistant to an antibiotic, the scientific community testing new theories, or an artist implementing a creative idea. The Quark and the Jaguar is Gell-Mann's own story of finding the connections between the basic laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world. The simple: a quark inside an atom. The complex: a jaguar prowling its jungle territory in the night. Exploring the relationship between them becomes a series of exciting intellectual adventures