“The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other.”

Source: More Is Different (1972), p. 393 of [More is different, Science, 177, 4047, 4 August 1972, 393–396, https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf]

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of…" by Philip Warren Anderson?
Philip Warren Anderson photo
Philip Warren Anderson 13
American physicist 1923

Related quotes

Buckminster Fuller photo
Herbert A. Simon photo

“Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: 1960s-1970s, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969, p. 53.

Kurt Gödel photo

“The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws”

Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) logician, mathematician, and philosopher of mathematics

governing their formation
As quoted in "On 'computabilism’ and physicalism: Some Problems" by Hao Wang, in Nature’s Imagination (1995), edited by J. Cornwall, p.161-189

Julian Schwinger photo
John Dalton photo
Thomas C. Schelling photo
Jane Goodall photo
Didier Sornette photo
J. Doyne Farmer photo
Frank Wilczek photo

Related topics