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(GWAVA: SPAM) What have the Romans - sorry - complexity done for us?

Posted by Michael Agar on Jul 24, 2006; 2:41pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/What-have-the-Romans-sorry-complexity-done-for-us-tp522232p522233.html

Well, there's the roads, yeah, and then there's the...

Romans are the right metaphor, since much of what's happened in the  
last X years has been diffusion of ideas--ideas, not measures--into  
numerous different domains. Like Kuhn said...

Mike


On Jul 24, 2006, at 7:21 AM, Robert Holmes wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I really enjoyed Joe's post and it set me thinking - exactly what  
> has complexity science achieved? IMHO, one measure of a field's  
> health is that the field moves forward (radical, huh?). If I look  
> at particle physics, they now know stuff that they didn't 15 years  
> ago (neutrino mass for example); if I look at high-temperature  
> superconductivity, Tc moves ever upwards. If I look at string  
> theory they ask (and occassionally answer) ever more abstruse and  
> unlikely questions that might not bear any relation to the real  
> world but are at least based on what was asked before.
>
> So here's the question: in the field of complexity science, exactly  
> what can we do now that we could not do 15 years ago?
>
> Robert
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