John Gribbin’s book ‘Deep Simplicity’ is one of those books that I cannot put down, once I have started reading it. It is gripping to see how simply rules emerge from chaos and form complex, rich and ever changing behaviors. As one having learning Physics, it is always fascinating to realize that there are completely predictable and known circumstances out of which unknown reactions arise. Gribbin’s example of the Three Balls is simply grounding: if two touching balls are struck in the middle by another ball (and they are all perfectly elastic), there is no mathematical way to predict where the three balls will bounce to. None. Intuitively, this looks like such a simply thing, but in reality it is complex.

Deep Simplicity (Penguin Press Science) by John Gribbin Read more about this book...

Here is the book’s synopsis from Amazon.co.uk: ‘In this brilliantly enlightening book John Gribbin, the man who made quantum theory clear with In Search of Schrodinger's Cat shows that complexity is simple, and explains how life has emerged from simple systems. Deep Simplicity is the first book to synthesize all the various ideas about chaos and complexity - from the butterfly effect to the intriguing concept of Gaia. It reveals that at the root of even what seems to be the most random behavior there are actually simple laws of cause and effect - essentially the same ones discovered by Newton 300 years ago. But the sensitive way in which systems respond to those basic laws, combined with feedback, can explain why, for example, just one vehicle braking on a motorway can cause a traffic jam; how a tiny genetic mutation or environmental change may make a species develop in a wholly different way; or why wild weather fluctuations can result from a slight change in atmospheric pressure. It can even explain people, the most complex systems of all, showing how we evolved from the most widely available raw materials in the Universe.’