Table Of ContentJOHN GRIBBIN
Deep Simplicity
Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Allen Lane 2004
Published in Penguin Books 2005
11
Copyright © John and Mary Gribbin, 2004
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way
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ISBN: 978-0-14-104221-3
For Jim Lovelock
It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a
computing machine an in�nite number of logical operations to �gure out what goes on in no
matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be
going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an in�nite amount of logic to �gure out what one
tiny piece of space/time is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately
physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed,
and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.
Richard Feynman
The Character of Physical Law
The simplicity of nature is not to be measured by that of our conceptions. In�nitely varied in its
e�ects, nature is simple only in its causes, and its economy consists in producing a great number
of phenomena, often very complicated, by means of a small number of general laws.
Pierre Laplace
1749–1827
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Simplicity of Complexity
1 Order out of Chaos
2 The Return of Chaos
3 Chaos out of Order
4 The Edge of Chaos
5 Earthquakes, Extinctions and Emergence
6 The Facts of Life
7 Life Beyond
Further Reading
Index
List of Illustrations
1.1 An unpredictable collision
1.2 The reversibility of time
1.3 The arrow of time
1.4 Simple equilibrium
1.5 ‘Mexican hat’ equilibrium
2.1 An unpredictable orbit
2.2 Unpredictable weather
2.3 The ‘butter�y’ diagram
3.1 The route to chaos
3.2 Period-doubling and chaos
3.3 The line that thinks it’s a plane
3.4 The Cheshire Cat line
3.5 The Cheshire Cat triangle
3.6 Making the Sierpinski gasket
3.7 A fractal fern
3.8 A curve with no bends
3.9 The Koch snow�ake
3.10 The Baker transformation
4.1 Convective rolls
4.2 How the leopard got its spots
5.1 The earthquake power law
5.2 Fractal coastlines
5.3 The noise of a quasar
5.4 The sounds of music
5.5 The pattern of death
5.6 The law of extinction
5.7 The law of avalanches
5.8 Networking and complexity
5.9 The secret of life
7.1 Signs of life
7.2 Daisyworld
7.3 Daisyworld with rabbits
7.4 The carbon dioxide/Ice Age connection
7.5 The nuclear physics of life
7.6 A self-portrait of life on Earth
Acknowledgements
As with all my books, Mary Gribbin played a signi�cant role in ensuring that
the ideas presented here are intelligible to someone with no background in
science. Her name would appear as co-author on the front of the book if it
were not for the prejudice of our editor at Penguin against joint authorship.
We are grateful to the University of Sussex for providing a base with access to
an excellent library and high-speed internet access, and to the Alfred C.
Munger Foundation for a �nancial contribution towards our research and
travel expenses.
The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to
reproduce artwork:
Figure 2.1 from Edward Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos, University of Washington
Press, 1993; Figures 2.3, 3.1, 3.4, 3.5, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9 from J. C. Sprott at
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/fractals/chaos; Figures 2.2, 3.10 from James
Gleick, Chaos, Heinemann, 1988; Figures 4.1, 5.7 from Per Bak, How Nature
Works, Oxford University Press, 1997; Figure 4.2 from James Murray,
Mathematical Biology, Springer-Verlag, 1993; Figure 5.2 from J. Feder, Fractals,
Plenum, 1988; Figure 5.4 from Philip Ball, The Self-Made Tapestry, Oxford
University Press, 1999; Figures 5.8, 5.9 from Stuart Kau�man, At Home in the
Universe, Oxford University Press, 1995; Figures 7.2, 7.3 courtesy Jim
Lovelock.
Every e�ort has been made to trace all copyright holders, and the author and
publishers will gladly rectify in future editions any errors or omissions brought
to their attention.
INTRODUCTION
The Simplicity of Complexity
The world around us seems to be a complex place. Although there are some
simple truths that seem to be eternal (apples always fall to the ground, not to
the sky; the Sun rises in the east, never in the west), our lives, in spite of
modern technology, are still, all too often, at the mercy of complicated
processes that produce dramatic changes out of the blue. Weather forecasting
is still as much an art as a science; earthquakes and volcanic eruptions strike
unpredictably, and seemingly at random; stock-market �uctuations continue to
produce boom and bust with no obvious pattern to them. From the time of
Galileo (in round numbers, the beginning of the seventeenth century) science
made progress – enormous progress – largely by ignoring these complexities,
and focusing on the simple questions, looking to explain why apples fall to the
ground, and why the Sun rises in the east. Progress was so spectacular, indeed,
that by about the middle of the twentieth century all the simple questions had
been answered. Concepts such as the general theory of relativity and quantum
mechanics explained the overall workings of the Universe on the very large
and very small scales respectively, while the discovery of the structure of DNA
and the way in which it is copied from generation to generation made life
itself, and evolution, seem simple at the molecular level. And yet, the
complexity of the world at the human level – at the level of life – remained.
The most interesting question of all, the question of how life could have
emerged from non-life, remained unanswered.
It is no surprise that the most complex features of the Universe, which
proved most reluctant to yield to the traditional methods of scienti�c
investigation, should exist on our scale. Indeed, we may be the most complex
things there are in the Universe. The reason is that on smaller scales entities
