作品简介
20世纪80年代，美国新墨西哥州的群山沙漠间，一场科学与思维的革命正在酝酿之中。这场科学运动的神经中枢是一个名为圣塔菲研究所的智库。聚集在这里的研究人员形形色色，既有梳着马尾辫的研究生，也不乏诺贝尔奖得主——物理学奖得主默里·盖尔曼和菲利普·安德森，经济学奖得主肯尼斯·阿罗。但他们有一个共同的愿景，那就是探寻一种底层的统一性，一个能揭示自然界和人类世界普遍复杂性的通用理论框架。他们相信，从过去20年在神经网络、生态学、人工智能和混沌理论等领域的智识发酵中，他们已经掌握了创建新框架的数学工具。他们相信，对这些思想的应用使他们能够以全新的方式理解这个世界的运行规律——并有可能对经济、商业甚至政治行为产生巨大影响。他们相信，圣塔菲研究所正在打造第一个严谨的、替代线性还原论思维的方法。
这就是关于他们的故事——如何努力打造“21世纪的科学”的故事。
书中以群像传记的形式，生动记录了复杂科学圣地圣塔菲研究所的诞生时刻。它不仅是一个独树一帜的研究所的故事，更是系统思维的启示录：从对古典主义经济学的颠覆到重新思考达尔文的进化论，从凝聚态物理到迭代囚徒困境，从亚马孙雨林的经济决策到地震的分布规律，从人工智能到遗传算法……本书借众多人物之口描绘了如何跨领域地系统思考，并启示我们：这个世界并非现成地存在着，而是无时无刻不在动态变化，我们唯一要做的就是理解并直面这真实世界中的复杂性。
M.米切尔·沃尔德罗普（M.Mitchell Waldrop），威斯康星大学理论物理学博士，著名科学作家，自由撰稿人。他曾是《科学》杂志的资深作者，《自然》杂志社论版块和专题编辑，还曾在美国国家科学基金会从事媒体事务。除本书外，他的著作还包括《梦想机器》等。
Introduction of works
In the 1980s, in the mountains and deserts of New Mexico, a revolution in science and thinking was brewing. The nerve center of this scientific movement is a think tank called the Santa Fe Institute. The researchers gathered here ranged from ponytailed graduate students to Nobel laureates - Murray Gell-Mann and Philip Anderson, laureates in physics, and Kenneth Arrow, winner of the economics prize. But they share a common vision: to search for an underlying unity, a universal theoretical framework that can reveal the universal complexity of the natural and human worlds. They believe they have the mathematical tools to create new frameworks from the intellectual ferment of the past two decades in fields such as neural networks, ecology, artificial intelligence, and chaos theory. The application of these ideas, they believe, enables them to understand the workings of the world in entirely new ways - and has the potential to have a dramatic impact on economic, business and even political behavior. The Santa Fe Institute, they believe, is creating the first serious alternative to linear reductionist thinking.
This is their story - the story of how they tried to build "science in the 21st century."
In the form of a group biography, the book vividly records the birth moment of the Santa Fe Institute, a shrine of complex science. It is not only the story of a unique institute, but also the revelation of systems thinking: from the subversion of classical economics to the rethinking of Darwin's evolution, from condensed matter physics to the iterative prisoner's dilemma, from economic decisions in the Amazon rainforest to the distribution law of earthquakes, from artificial intelligence to genetic algorithms... Through the words of many characters, this book describes how to think systematically across domains, and reveals that the world is not ready-made, but is constantly changing, and the only thing we have to do is to understand and face the complexity of this real world.
M.Mitchell Waldrop, PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Wisconsin, is a renowned science writer and freelance writer. He was a senior author at Science, an editorial and features editor at Nature, and worked on media affairs at the National Science Foundation. In addition to this book, he is also the Dream Machine and other books.
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