Complexity (M. Mitchell Waldrop)

Why it’s on the list: Waldrop’s account of the founding of the Santa Fe Institute — which belongs on this list less for the science than as a case study in deliberately building an institution with no departments, to see whether that changes what gets discovered.

Where I heard about it

• The replies to Sarah Guo — named in answer to her question on X (March 2025): “is there a book / essay about environments that best support scientific discovery? Not about specifically bell labs, cavendish, xerox parc, los alamos - but why these places were so productive?” The full list of replies is on Is There a Book… (tweet).

Connections

• Complexity — the concept page; this card is the book, disambiguated.
• Scientific Research — SFI as an institutional experiment, which is the thread’s actual question.
• The Dream Machine — same author, same interest in the funder-and-institution layer.