Excerpt

The first workshop to define what is now the Santa Fe Institute took place on October 5–6, 1984. I was recently asked to give some reminiscences of the event, to be included in a republication of a collection of papers derived from this and subsequent workshops.

It was a slightly dark room, decorated with Native American artifacts. Around it were tables arranged in a large rectangle, at which sat a couple of dozen men (yes, all men), mostly in their sixties. The afternoon was wearing on, with many different people giving their various views about how to organize what amounted to a great new interdisciplinary university. 

I think I was less patient in those days. But eventually I could stand it no longer. I don’t remember my exact words, but they boiled down to: “What are you going to do if you only raise a few million dollars, not hundreds of millions?” It was a strange moment. After all, I was by far the youngest person there—at twenty-five years old—and yet it seemed to have fallen to me to play the “let’s get real” role. (To be fair, I had founded my first tech company a couple of years earlier, and wasn’t a complete stranger to the world of grandiose “what if” discussions, even if I was surprised, though more than a little charmed, to be seeing them in the sixty-something-year-old set.)

George Cowan was running the meeting, and I sensed a mixture of frustration and relief at my question. I don’t remember precisely what he said, but it boiled down to: “Well, what do you think we should do?”

“Well,” I said, “I do have a suggestion.” I summarized it a bit, but then it was agreed that later that day I should give a more formal presentation. And that’s basically how I came to suggest that what would become the Santa Fe Institute should focus on what I called “Complex Systems Theory.”

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