Here is a valuable, broad-brush, popularized look at the interface between the simple and the complex, be it in the physical, biological, engineering, or behavioral domain. The marvelous title of this complex book comes from a poem by Arthur Sze. The book is written in the spirit of Norbert Wiener and Richard Feynman, who wrote immensely popular books on highly technical topics. While he provides deep insights into a wide spectrum of topics, Gell-Mann will have trouble reaching a large general audience. For one thing, this Nobel laureate physicist presents surprisingly little autobiographical material; indeed, he would appear to have great difficulty in writing a popular autobiography, unlike, say, Wiener. Further, the frequent mentions of the Santa Fe Institute, which will be interpreted as bragging, may put off the general reader.

Much space is devoted to ideas on algorithms, computation, and computers as well as their uses. For example, there are brief discussions, often intertwined with interesting speculations, on such topics as algorithmic information content in the senses of Chaitin, Kolmogorov, or Solomonoff; complex adaptive systems; expert systems; self-organizing systems; genetic algorithms; system simulations; different kinds of complexity (but not NP-completeness); and information processing. On the other hand, there are also numerous thoughtful discussions in several other major areas, such as randomness; regularities in price fluctuations; the evolution of drug resistance in bacteria; Darwinian evolution; universal gravitation; the power of theory; depth and crypticness; the quantum universe; superstring theory; diversities under threat; quantum mechanics; mechanisms of decoherence; quarks; fermions; and bosons. In this splendid work, one can even detect a historical evolution: yin and yang, prime and composite, wave and particle, quark and jaguar. In any case, the quark satisfies our need for order, while the prowling Jaguar satisfies our logic of chaos.

Gell-Mann is a history-intoxicated physicist, with extensive discussions (perhaps influenced by Feynman) of alternative histories, coarse-grained histories, fine-grained histories, and quasiclassical histories, among others. He has sustained the value and success of theoretical physics. One must ask, though, what it would take, in, say, molecular biology, to pose a major theory so sublime as to significantly challenge experimentalists to verify it or refute it. All in all, this wonderful fact-packed book is more jaguar than quark.