Re: The Next Century's Great Discovery

Anders Sandberg (nv91-asa@nada.kth.se)
Sun, 27 Jul 1997 23:27:39 +0200 (MET DST)


On Fri, 25 Jul 1997, Rick Knight wrote:

> What will be the 21st-century equivalent of the discovery of the
> electron or DNA?

OK, here is a wild guess:

A general theory of complexity - something that actually gives us
some predictive ability about the growth of complex systems. Would
probably involve an objective measure of complexity. Evolution and a
lot of other fields could be derived from it - alife, morphogenes, a
lot of "soft" fields would blossom and new fields appear overnight
(complexity engineering, anyone?).

I'm not sure this is possible, but if it can occur, it will likely be
more important to the future evolution of ourselves than we can
imagine.

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