WIL: Deep Simplicity
I just finished reading the book Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin.
Whilst I enjoyed it in parts, I can’t in good faith add it to my Rec’s. That’s not because I didn’t think it was good: it’s because truthfully I don’t think I understood it well enough to know whether it was good or not.
In general, I struggle with popular science as a genre, particularly when it comes to theoretical physics and mathematics. There’s something that just doesn’t “click” in my brain, and the numbers are so ludicrously large (at the Universe scale) or small (at the atomic scale) that it blends into meaningless exponentials on a page.
In that light, it was probably not a great idea to pick a book on complexity theory for leisurely reading. I grasped some high-level concepts but I had to read and re-read paragraphs frequently. It felt like I was missing too much foundational knowledge and vocabulary to appreciate the nuance - like watching a foreign language film and missing the characters’ subtle facial expressions as my eyes flicker back and forth between subtitles and substance.
That said, this what (I think) I learnt:
- The Universe operates on relatively simple building blocks that honour physical laws
- But things trend towards chaos over time, at speed and at scale, making a lot of the Universe impossible to predict because the real world adds so much complexity (including when taking into account feedback loops)
- At the edge of chaos - just before it kicks in - there are some neat patterns that form that offer a window into why things are the way they are (at least for now)
- The Power Law is a natural phenomenon that repeats in many contexts across natural systems (earthquake severity, city populations, market shocks, etc.) - it’s a law of nature
That’s it, really. Not a great return on 20+ hours of sometimes-tortured reading. But something, at least.
I’ll try again, one day, maybe when I’m feeling braver. But onto something lighter for now…