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The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

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From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes an explanation of the connections between nature at its most basic level and natural selection, archaeology, linguistics, child development, computers, and other complex adaptive systems. Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann offers a uniquely personal and unifying vision of the relationship between the fundamental laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world.

ISBN-13: 9780805072532

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Publication Date: 09-15-1995

Pages: 392

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.92(d)

Murray Gell-Mann, the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics. In 1984, he helped establish the Santa Fe Institute, where he now works. A longtime director of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Professor Gell-Man served as chairman of its Committee on World Environment and Resources.

Table of Contents

Preface ix
Part I The Simple and the Complex
1 Prologue: An Encounter in the Jungle 3
2 Early Light 11
3 Information and Crude Complexity 23
4 Randomness 43
5 A Child Learning a Language 51
6 Bacteria Developing Drug Resistance 63
7 The Scientific Enterprise 75
8 The Power of Theory 89
9 What Is Fundamental? 107
Part II The Quantum Universe
10 Simplicity and Randomness in the Quantum Universe 123
11 A Contemporary View of Quantum Mechanics: Quantum Mechanics and the Classical Approximation 135
12 Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle 167
13 Quarks and All That: The Standard Model 177
14 Superstring Theory: Unification at Last? 199
15 Time's Arrows: Forward and Backward Time 215
Part III Selection and Fitness
16 Selection at Work in Biological Evolution and Elsewhere 235
17 From Learning to Creative Thinking 261
18 Superstition and Skepticism 275
19 Adaptive and Maladaptive Schemata 291
20 Machines That Learn or Simulate Learning 307
Part IV Diversity and Sustainability
21 Diversities Under Threat 329
22 Transitions to a More Sustainable World 345
23 Afterword 367
Index 377