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Lambert Williams

Doctoral Candidate

Harvard University and MPI Berlin

Email: williams(at)mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

Homepage: http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/members/williams

Complexity :: 1960 - 2000

The project of Lambert Williams examines the emergence and dispersion of the sciences of complexity from 1960 to the present. A particular emphasis is placed on the work done in 'virtual experimentation', 'experimental mathematics', and other trends in modelling and simulation technique. The project scrutinises how concrete knowledge claims spring out of an interwoven mesh of simulated entities, evolving technological arrangements, a sometimes less than seamless correspondence between theory and phenomenology, and so on.

As regards periodization, 1960 is not intended in any sense as an 'undeniable point of origin', but rather a point at which many lines of work with vastly complicated filiations start to 'coagulate' in a most interesting way. The project invokes two main threads, obviously to be intertwined in practice but pulled apart here for exposition. First, we want to have a story of how and why this vastly interdisciplinary 'family of ideas' emerged, perpetuated and continues to perpetuate. Second, we need a very careful articulation of the methodology best framing this new formation.  

Considered generally the dynamics of disciplinary formation (and, by implication, the relation of discipline formation to other salient formations - material, conceptual, and so on) were until recently rather poorly articulated in the history of science. But several well-known and far more satisfying accounts have recently sprung forth. For concreteness, we think of Olesko peering into discipline and practice at Königsberg; or of Warwick's foray into how the Victorian Wranglers mastered their theoretical technology by reference to coaching, drilling, repetition and competition; or most recently of Kaiser's work on the pedagogical inculcation (over decades, not years) that proved necessary to transform Feynman diagrams from loose and locally incubated bookkeeping devices into an absolutely standard item in the physicist's toolbox.      

Turning to the sciences of complexity post 1960, however, we quickly see that they cannot be treated as merely a recent case study to be logged in the disciplinary formation genre. The difference turns on two axes: localism / globalism and stabilisation / reconfiguration. In turn:

Both Olesko and Warwick show that for the 19 th - and early 20 th - century, very good work indeed can result from espousing a strong localism. And though to a lesser extent, a good part of Kaiser's story is also local: globalism in some sense starts where his monograph stops. Arbitrarily taking media of communication as one obvious hook on which the difference I urge can be hung, the world of Olesko and Warwick is one of pens and ink; Kaiser's a world of handcranked mimeographs. Mine is a networked community of computational tinkers, and this greater globalism demands new tools from the historian. It is here that the themes of the group are most explicitly addressed, in a spectrum running from the 'schmieröl' of technology (the nuances of different computing facilities, bug trapping, the rise of 'virtual experimental systems') right across to fundamental concepts themselves (linearity, emergence, self organization and more).

The second axis, of stablisation versus reconfiguration, pushes against an increasingly standard and categorical view of what goes on when a new family of ideas comes into being. Common sense might lead one to imagine that inventing a new discipline has something to do with 'cordoning off' a given domain and then 'stabilising it' or 'making it your own' via pedagogy and the deployment of techniques, via socialisation and the development of a specific credit and accreditation process, and so on. As with my argument for localism working well only at a specific site or moment, so with stabilisation. Sites or ecologies traditionally scrutinised in science studies - laboratories, for instance - mesh nicely with what I call the stabilization story. But again, this may not provide an entirely satisfying picture for the sciences of complexity. Cordoning off seems less interesting than the violation of cordons and perpetual interdisciplinarity. One can glean much about complexity science from work in which Economists, Computer Scientists, Physicists and many more are simultaneously on parade and worrying about the same sorts of problems - equivalence between economies and spin glasses, to give a well-known example, or how percolation theory illuminates such sociological phenomena as changing fashion sensibility. To really get to the heart of this we must attend closely to complexity scientists travelling around and reconfiguring domains, rather than looking for one more case just confirming the standard stabilisation story.        

Of course, in a project running for finite time one cannot follow complexity scientists around through the full and ongoing cycle of reconfiguration; nor can one examine every site hooked up to the global system. For practical purposes, one has to put certain key hubs and spokes under the microscope, and early attention in this project does zone in on some very concrete cases: UC Santa Cruz at the time of 1970s counterculture, the Santa Fe Institute in the 1980s and 1990s, certain subgroups at Los Alamos such as T-13 and the Center for Nonlinear Studies, and some of the private concerns that have been recently built with an eye on financial markets. These sites have been selected because they represent my main themes at their most evangelical. For both texture and comparison, however, further sites will be added in due course.




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