This mathematician is making sense of nature’s complexityHungarian scholar Gábor Domokos aims to understand the physical world by describing its forms in the simplest possible geometry. Inspired by rock cracks, he devised a new framework for classifying polygonal tessellation that’s flexible enough to accommodate messy natural patterns, but rigorous enough to be useful. Applied in geology, it reveals universal patterns in the geometry of fractures at every scale from mud cracks to the tectonic jigsaw, and it’s now helping NASA scientists understand the surfaces of other worlds.
Why is the universe so complex and beautiful?Everything around us—trees, stars, planets, waterfalls, meatloaf, squirrels, other people—is all just... stuff. Stuff made of teeny tiny subatomic particles. But why is any of this stuff here? There are hundreds of trillions upon hundreds of trillions upon hundreds of trillions (and multiple hundreds of trillions more beyond that) of subatomic particles throughout the universe. Scatter those particles at random, and the universe would just be a monotonous desert of sameness, a thin vacuum without any structure much larger than an atom for billions of light-years in any direction. But we don't have that. Instead, we have all of this... stuff. So why does the universe have all of these beautiful and complex things when it could've had nothing? Physicists are working to find out.
Learning from catastropheThree books reckon with technological complexity and the wicked problems it creates.
По словам Дойча, «теория конструкторов, если точно, не о конструкторах, а о задачах для конструкции чего-либо: о том, что возможно для конструктора сделать и что невозможно. А возможно то, что не запрещено законами физики».