Excerpt

First disseminated in mimeographed form in 1985, Emerging Syntheses in Science was the first publication of the Santa Fe Institute. It contained written versions of most of the talks given at the two 1984 Founding Workshops out of which SFI emerged. A few years later, at a meeting of SFI’s Science Board, John Hopfield, suggested that the fledgling institute could help establish its scientific creditability by publishing the proceedings of its workshops. A publisher, Addison-Wesley, was soon found for the proposed series, the Santa Fe Institute Studies on the Sciences of Complexity, and Emerging Syntheses in Science was published in 1988 as its initial volume.

As of 2014, the volume had gone out of print. However, SFI’s President at the time, Jerry Sabloff, decided that making it available once more by publishing an online version would be an important contribution to SFI’s thirtieth anniversary year. He asked me to edit the online version and write a brief commentary to accompany it, and I agreed to do so.

As I began work on the project, I discovered that the SFI archives contained a complete transcript of the discussions that took place during the Founding Workshops, Oct. 6–7, 1984. A review of these shows that the discussion sessions arguably played a significant role in determining SFI’s first thirty years, and that a number of the issues raised during these sessions may be relevant to its next thirty years. The appendix to this volume therefore includes a slightly edited transcript of those discussion sessions. This is followed by a copy of George Cowan’s initial major fundraising letter and some of the materials that accompanied it.

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