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- Why are the instruction manuals for cell phones
incomprehensible?
- Why is a truck driver's job as hard as a CEO's?
- How can 10 percent of every medical dollar cure 90 percent of the
world's disease?
- Why do bad teams win so many games?
Complexity, as any scientist will tell you, is a slippery idea. Things
that seem complicated can be astoundingly simple; things that seem
simple can be dizzyingly complex. A houseplant may be more intricate
than a manufacturing plant. A colony of garden ants may be more
complicated than a community of people. A sentence may be richer than a
book, a couplet more complicated than a song.
These and other paradoxes are driving a whole new
science--simplexity--that is redefining how we look at the world and
using that new view to improve our lives in fields as diverse as
economics, biology, cosmology, chemistry, psychology, politics, child
development, the arts, and more. Seen through the lens of this
surprising new science, the world becomes a delicate place filled with
predictable patterns--patterns we often fail to see as we're time and
again fooled by our instincts, by our fear, by the size of things, and
even by their beauty.
In Simplexity, Time senior writer Jeffrey Kluger
shows how a drinking straw can save thousands of lives; how a million
cars can be on the streets but just a few hundred of them can lead to
gridlock; how investors behave like atoms; how arithmetic governs
abstract art and physics drives jazz; why swatting a TV indeed makes it
work better. As simplexity moves from the research lab into popular
consciousness it will challenge our models for modern living. Jeffrey
Kluger adeptly translates newly evolving theory into a delightful
theory of everything that will have you rethinking the rules of
business, family, art--your world.
pub date: 2008-06-03 | hardcover | 9781401303013 |
