More Is Different
The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.
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The broken ladder
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Reductionism works within regimes. But at each scale, emergent principles take over: symmetry breaking, chemistry, life, cognition. The whole is not in the parts, not in practice.
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Why it matters outside physics
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Anderson targets arrogant reductionism in science policy. The essay is short and quoted constantly in debates about whether biology is "just chemistry" or AI is "just statistics."
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With complex systems
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Pair with Cook and Newman: one says levels matter, one says failure is structural, one says distributions have heavy tails. Together they sketch how to think about large systems without pretending one equation rules all.