Shifting Sands: how nature works
Peter Lipton, 3 September 1998
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.