The new science of complexity

Deterministic chaos, and even maximum computational complexity, have been discovered within Newtonian dynamics. Encouraged by comparisons of the economy with the weather, a Newtonian system, economists assume that prices and price changes can also obey abstract mathematical laws of motion. Meanwhile, sociologists and other postmodernists advertise that physics and chemistry have outgrown their former limitations, that chaos and complexity provide new holistic paradigms for science, and that the boundaries between the hard and the soft sciences, once impenetrable, have disappeared along with the Berlin Wall. Three hundred years after the deaths of Galileo, Descartes, and Kepler, and the birth of Newton, reductionism would appear to be on the decline, with holistic approaches to science on the upswing. We therefore examine the evidence that dynamical laws of motion may be discovered from empirical studies of chaotic or complex phenomena, and also review the foundations of reductionism.