Summary
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss complexity and how it can help us understand the world around us. When living beings come together and act in a group, they do so in complicated and unpredictable ways: societies often behave very differently from the individuals within them. Complexity was a phenomenon little understood a generation ago, but research into complex systems now has important applications in many different fields, from biology to political science. Today it is being used to explain how birds flock, to predict traffic flow in cities and to study the spread of diseases.
With:
Ian Stewart Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick
Jeff Johnson Professor of Complexity Science and Design at the Open University
Professor Eve Mitleton-Kelly Director of the Complexity Research Group at the London School of Economics.
Producer: Thomas Morris.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. |
| 0:38.7 | For more details about in our time and for our terms of use please go to BBC.co. UK slash radio for. I hope you enjoy |
| 0:45.9 | the program. Hello in the late 1940s a chemist in Brussels called Ilia |
| 0:52.0 | pregojin embarked on research which would take him in |
| 0:55.4 | rather surprising directions. |
| 0:57.1 | His work concerned the energy associated with chemical reactions and in 1977 he won him a Nobel Prize in chemistry but it also |
| 1:05.3 | led him to write a book about traffic management surely one of the more |
| 1:08.8 | startling examples of the unexpected consequences of scientific research. |
| 1:13.0 | Prigagene proved something which scientists before him had doubted that it's possible to create order from disorder. |
| 1:19.0 | He realized that his ideas applied not just to chemical reactions but to the wider world from city traffic problems to how a colony of ants organises itself. |
| 1:28.0 | Today this field of study is known as complexity. |
| 1:31.0 | Complexity theorists study the ways in which large groups of individuals behave collectively. |
| 1:36.5 | Complexity only emerges a separate discipline around 40 years ago, but today it's used to study |
| 1:40.8 | difficult problems fields such as diverse as biology and international politics |
| 1:46.0 | to explain the way birds flock and how the economy works. |
| 1:49.6 | We mean to discuss complexity are Ian Stewart, emeritus professor of mathematics at the |
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