The Big Picture

We often think that we can understand things by taking them apart. But to really understand how things work, we need to put them back together again. When we do, surprising things happen that we could never have predicted from the individual parts.

Systems composed of many interacting parts can have properties that are qualitatively different from the properties of the parts. This concept of emergence is central to many of the biggest scientific challenges such as new states of matter, quantum gravity, cognition, artificial intelligence, economic instability, and social cohesion. I will explain what emergence is, why it matters, and insights for other fields from condensed matter physics.