Reductionism breaks the world into elementary building blocks. Emergence finds the simple laws that arise out of complexity. These two complementary ways of viewing the universe come together in ...

On October 8, 2024, the field of physics was plunged into controversy. That day, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for discoveries not involving black holes, cosmology, or strange new subatomic ...

The idea that everything that exists can be built from the bottom up has long held sway among physicists. Now, a new kind of science is under construction that centres conscious experience – and might ...

What if, just before we reach the bottom, we find out that reductionism fails? Big things are made of smaller things, and those smaller things are made of smaller things still. That’s reductionism in ...

This is the fourth in a series of posts whose central scientific point is stated as a conclusion, not a question like the title above. We seem, in the biosphere, to be beyond Newton, beyond Laplace, ...