Shifting Sands

Peter Lipton

  • How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organised Criticality by Per Bak
    Oxford, 212 pp, £18.99, June 1997, ISBN 0 19 850164 1

Taken alone, the basic laws of physics suggest a bleak universe, a thin, cold soup of atoms in motion. From this point of view, the complex dynamic structures we actually find, animate and inanimate, seem a miracle, so prompting the famous argument for the existence of God, that such manifest design requires a Designer. The argument from design has serious weaknesses, but one may still wonder what to put in its place. Per Bak, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, thinks he has the answer: self-organised criticality.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions