Complexity, Emergence and Information
Issue 2 June 2014
On ‘Reinventing the Sacred’
The word ‘sacred’ is not a word that has been used within modern science. In this exclusive interview, Stuart Kauffman discusses how our scientific understanding of complexity and emergence has “Reinvented the Sacred”.
Stanza: The Emergent City
Can we use new technologies to imagine a world where we are liberated and empowered, where finally all of the technology becomes more than gimmick and starts to actually work for us or are these technologies going to control us, separate us, divide us, create more borders?
On ‘Decoding Reality’
For a physicist, all the world is information. The Universe and its workings are the ebb and flow of information. In this engaging and mind-stretching interview, Vlatko Vedral considers some of the deepest questions about the Universe and considers the implications of interpreting it in terms of information.
Cancer and Complexity in an Unfolding World
Simeon Nelson’s art installation, Anarchy in the Organism, featured four simultaneous algorithmic videos and eight-speaker ‘whispering windows’. The book that followed explored integrative ways of looking at disparate phenomena to confront the possible meanings of cancer.
Wonder
Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988) was an American theoretical physicist who became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In 1965 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. In his poem ‘Wonder’ he muses on the emergence of complexity and consciousness from the blind play of atoms.
Hermetica
Mercury is placed at the vertex of a speaker cone, producing photograms that resonate between order and chaos .
The Emergence of Consciousness
Anna Dumitriu is an artist whose work blurs the boundaries between art and science with a strong interest in ethical issues raised by emerging technologies and their impact on society. The “Emergence of Consciousness” project was a collaboration with scientists at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at The University of Sussex.
Visualization Metaphors: Old & New
As with many other contemporary visualization techniques, the roots of arc diagrams and treemaps are considerably deeper than what they seem.
Creationism and Scientism: One Mindset, Two Belief Systems
Creationism and Scientism appear to disagree on almost everything but, as B Alan Wallace examines, they share much more in common than either group would like to admit.