Complexity

"They were well told – books that I picked up and could not put down, which is rare for popular science. And with Complexity, for example, it’s made me want to follow what’s going on. I work in cosmology and in cosmology you have something very large scale, but when you start looking at the details of how galaxies form and how they interact it’s very complex, so in the back of my mind I do feel that the universe is an archetypal complex system. And ideas of complexity have not been applied to cosmology as much as I think they should be. I have, in fact, just embarked on writing a book that is a history of general relativity, told through some very interesting characters. And the interesting thing is that the history of modern physics is pretty much tied to the 20th century history – to the rise of Nazism, World War Two, the Cold War – and there’s a certain vein that I’ll be following. I plan to follow that through to the modern world and try to work out what leads people to work in certain fields."