Excerpt

Social and Political Origins

The long, dark shadow cast by the Manhattan project resulted in an unexpected quantum of illumination in the years following the Second World War. Areas of research that had been stimulated by the war effort and the multiple challenges of building the atomic bomb found the necessary resources and public interest in peacetime to fuel and invigorate new and foundational research programs. These burgeoning areas spanned the entire spectrum of science and technology, from operations research, fundamental physics, biomedicine, and computer science to economics, political science, and psychology. 

This unanticipated consequence provided both the intellectual prologue and the origin of the communities that would,
forty years later, come together to create the Santa Fe Institute. These comprised elementary particle and condensed matter physicists, biologists seeking to understand the regulation of gene expression, chemists inquiring into the origins of life, computer and cognitive scientists searching for the ingredients of intelligence and its possible implementation in solid-state hardware—with all of them implicitly daring to ask: Might there be something resembling a grand unified theory for complex adaptive systems? If so, how should it be pursued? By what means and in what community?

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