More is different.

hypothesis may still lbe a topic for controversy among philosophers, but among the great majority of active scientists I think it is accepted without question The workings of our minds and bodles, and of all the animate or lnanimate matter of which we have any detailed knowledges are as sumed to be controlled by the same set o£ fundamental laws which except under certain extreme conditions we feel we know pretty well. It seems inevitable to go on uneritically to what appears at first sight to bean obvious corollary of reduction ism: that if everything obeys the same fundamental laws, then the only sci entists who are studying anything really fundamental are those who are working on those laws. In practice, that amounts to some astrophysicists, some elementary particle physicists, some logicians and other mathematicians, and few others. This point of view, which it is the main purpose of this article to oppose, is expressed in a rather wellknown passage by Weisskopf (1):