Investigations: Investigations Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Investigations: Investigations Book

As a rule, when a distinguished scientist says he's come up with a fourth law of thermodynamics, he's wrong. In Investigations, Stuart Kauffman may be the exception. The three laws of thermodynamics have been summarised as: "you can't win", "you can't break even", and "you can't get out of the game". Kauffman's candidate for a fourth law is: "but the game keeps getting more complicated, and there are always different ways to play." One of Kauffman's key concepts is that of the adjacent possible. Imagine a set of things that exists in a particular system (such as a group of reacting chemicals, or an ecological community, or the kinds of toys available in a capitalist economy). The adjacent possible is the set of things that are only one step away from actual existence. Like potential energy in physics, the adjacent possible is a metaphysical idea with real utility. You can think of "normal science" (as described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) as proceeding step by step into the adjacent possible. Most self-styled revolutionary scientific treatises are really crackpottery. They don't stop in the adjacent possible; they go wandering across the landscape and over the speculative horizon. Investigations may be the real thing. Kauffman is pushing into the adjacent possible at many points, from biology, chemistry, thermodynamics, and economics. As he says, "whatever Investigations is--useful, as I hope, or foolish--it is not normal science." --Mary Ellen CurtinRead More

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  • Amazon

    Offers an investigation of the basis of life itself. By defining and explaining autonomous agents and work in the contexts of thermodynamics and of information theory, this work explores the requirements for the emergence of a general biology that transcends terrestrial biology to seek laws governing biospheres anywhere in the cosmos.

  • Blackwell

    A bold exploration of the very essence of life itself, Investigations supplies a novel answer to the question, What is life? 44 illustrations. In the tradition of Schrodinger's classic What Is Life?, this book is a tour-de-force investigation...

  • 0195121058
  • 9780195121056
  • Stuart A. Kauffman
  • 9 January 2003
  • OUP USA
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 308
  • New Ed
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