The English Jill Perkins and Jan Morley started in 1987 as a small home, garden and kitchen business selling products they manufactured themselves. Small paintings, painted mugs, printed linen. However, the designer duo's business started to take serious shape when they launched a series of products under the name 'collective nouns'. 'Collective nouns' are nouns for collectives, usually animals. For example, at school, you learn that a group of ants is called a colony, that a group of herrings swim in a school and that a group of starlings together form a swarm.

Perkins and Morley’s products feature attractive drawings of groups of animals; below the animals their 'collective nouns' are written. They often sound even nicer in English and English has many more of these types of concepts than Dutch. For example, the tea towels I purchased contain drawings of a prickle of hedgehogs, a mischief of mice and a scurry of squirrels. The words sound just right. You feel the spines of the prickle hedgehogs, suspect the mischief of the mice, and see the scurry squirrels zooming up along a tree. My favorite collective noun (which is not on the tea towels by the way)? I'm torn between a dazzle of zebras or a loveliness of ladybugs.

Collectives are greatly appealing. Many people love the beautiful patterns that a flock of starlings forms in the sky. Sometimes thousands of starlings gather at their roosts, making quite a noise. They move like waves through the air and from a collection of individual starlings suddenly become a flock with its own identity, its own independence, a collective noun. It is that magical, elusive moment when the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. A change of dimension. A different perspective on the group that has become one. A miracle.

It is precisely that magic that is at the heart of the research field of complexity science, a term that reportedly has more than 34 definitions and in some sense always remains a bit elusive. However, that does not mean that you cannot investigate anything using complexity science. Nor does it mean that this research cannot have a direct and major impact on the world. Climate models, for example, are predictions about the behavior of a complex system of physics. These models play a role in making good choices for the future. The financial market is a complex system and we only have to think back to 2008 to understand the magnitude of the implications of its crash.

Complexity science is not new. Scientists often regard Adam Smith as a complexity scientist avant la lettre. After all, according to his theory, an invisible force emerges from all individual, selfish choices of man, the homo economicus. This force, the 'invisible hand', would ensure that through all those combined individual choices, society as a whole will always ultimately find itself in balance and therefore be best off. The economic health of society in this case becomes the collective noun of all individual economic choices. The idea of the invisible hand lies at the basis of free market thinking that had and still has an impact on the world that can hardly be overestimated (although this does not necessarily mean that the idea is correct!).

It is not without reason that many of the ideas about complexity started in ecology. After all, this is a field in which people have always been concerned with the relationships of different organisms in an ecosystem, and how those relationships ultimately lead to more or less robust systems. Ecology is by definition a systems science and we can learn a lot from this ecological thinking. More and more scientists are doing this. For example, research has now been done into leaderless flocks of starlings that form spontaneously organized patterns among themselves by following simple rules. This knowledge was then applied by analogy to groups of drones. Who will be the first to come up with the noun for a group of drones?

There is also extensive research on how relatively 'dumbly' ants or termites follow simple rules among themselves, but as a colony deliver the most bizarre architectural feats. Some of these ways appear to be suspiciously similar to how neural networks form in our brains.

One of the important characteristics of complex systems is emergence, a change of dimension from the individual as a unit to the group as a unit. From very close up you only see blobs of paint in a painting, but if you distance yourself enough, you suddenly see The Night Watch. That is emergence. By taking the right distance, studying a phenomenon on the right scale, the sum of its parts suddenly comes into focus. At that invisible moment, that sum takes on its own character and becomes something fundamentally different. A miracle.

Complex systems are not only characterized by emergences; they are also adaptive systems. They change over time and adapt to changing circumstances. This can lead to self-reinforcing effects, which create a spiral that takes everything with it and becomes irreversible. For example, certain physical tipping points have been identified in climate science that can bring the system into a fundamentally different state. Perhaps the best known is the feedback loop of the albedo effect: the less snow there is, the less white a surface becomes. The less white the surface is, the less sunlight is reflected from Earth. The less sunlight is reflected, the warmer the surface becomes. And the warmer the surface becomes, the more snow will melt. The more snow melts, the less light is reflected, and so on. This process is happening faster and faster. Until at some point, all the snow is gone.

You see these kinds of spirals everywhere in social life. Take poverty. The poorer you are, the more you have to focus on getting by and surviving. The more you have to focus on survival, the less room you can make in your head to make good plans for the future, and the less budget you have to take advantage of the economies of scale that rich people profit from. For example, an annual subscription converted is usually cheaper per month than a monthly subscription, but only if you are rich can you actually pay for that annual subscription in advance. As investigative journalist Barbara Ehrenreich nicely summarized: 'It is expensive to be poor'.

Because on the other hand, rich people have oodles of time at their disposal. They can spend it on investing their money wisely, which makes them increasingly rich. Moreover, they can take advantage of all the benefits of being rich, such as getting a discount if you can pay for something in one go. Of course, there are all kinds of governmental interventions to prevent such processes, but what matters is the idea of spirals in a complex system.

Lately, you've heard the word 'linear' thrown around more and more, and it rarely has an intelligent connotation. 'Simple souls think linearly, smart ones think exponentially', that's pretty much the idea. In a mathematical sense, this is of course nonsense, because there are both linear and exponential processes and one process is not 'better' than the other. What is true is that it is often difficult for people to sense something like exponential growth. We are evolutionarily designed to learn from the past and then extend those lessons directly, linearly, to the future. Think of a hunter from prehistoric times: there was a lion here for the past ten days, tomorrow there will be a lion here too. Thus, let me avoid this place.

The clearest example of this human inability was seen during the pandemic. "The number of infections in recent weeks has been this high, and it will likely be just as high in the coming weeks." Many people could not imagine the concept of exponential growth, how a small change can have enormous consequences.

This is reflected in the famous legend of the inventor of the chessboard in the fifth century BC. The King of India was so pleased with the new game that he had the inventor come up with his own reward. The inventor asked for an exponential increase of grains of rice on the 64 squares of the chessboard: one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on. The king thought he had a good deal and immediately agreed. But he soon realized that the inventor had tricked him. If you calculate this, it ultimately amounts to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice - enough to feed the entire (current) world population for about two centuries.

Complex systems have always existed, but it is only since the 1950s that more and more research on the world has been done through a complexity lens. Physicists, mathematicians, biologists and information theorists apply their laws and models to systems of small particles, which are also called 'agents'. These could, for example, be bacteria, atoms, or bits of binary data (which always consist of codes of plus or minus, black or white). These scientists see how certain fixed patterns arise in such abstract systems and try to understand what these patterns can mean for the 'real' world. What can they tell us about the way our brains work, or AI, or how tipping points in the climate arise or can be prevented? Ultimately, the complexity lens may even tell us something about how life originated on Earth and could arise differently, elsewhere or here, perhaps without us realizing it. Because do we know whether we would recognize other types of life as such?

At first, this all mainly seems to be a 'beta' matter, but recently social scientists have also started to become more and more interested in this kind of research. In these cases, individual people are the agents in the complex system. How does a phenomenon like polarization arise from the totality of individual opinions and views? How does a society become segregated by the sum of individual (often unavoidable) choices of citizens in space? How do echo chambers and online hate arise on social media?

If we see society as the collective noun of all individual citizens, we may be able to recognize the general patterns that arise in complex systems earlier and prevent negative spirals. Or stimulate just the positive spirals. Perhaps, as a counterpart to climatological, negative tipping points, social, positive tipping points can also be identified with which people as a group can push the Earth's disrupted climate system in a different direction.

What role can the government play in this? And companies? What is the role of the individual citizen and can they be moved in a certain direction to achieve the 'right' emergence? Think of 'nudging' from citizens or consumers, preventive lifestyle medicine, or simply good old subsidies and taxes. Can we control, prevent or even eliminate tipping points? Can we influence the 'right emergences'? And another question: is there such a thing as a 'correct' emergence? And who actually decides that?

Here, questions from the social sciences and the natural sciences directly intersect. Complexity science is therefore characterized by interdisciplinarity. Research into complex systems often takes place in the gray space between scientific disciplines and that is not always easy. Within the boundaries of one's own discipline, it always seems warm and safe. Moreover, institutions often encourage people to stay in that safe place. In fact, stepping outside the discipline is sometimes even punished, directly or indirectly. Yet it is precisely in those border areas where all kinds of exciting, new insights are gained.

Ideally, complexity research will continue to expand, outside of science as well. Consider, for example, researchers from the world of policy, art and journalism. The danger of expanding the boundaries of a research area is that it becomes bogged down in a swamp of broadness. At the same time, we simply have no choice. In today's world, more and more systems are interlocking. The climate and biodiversity crises, uncontrolled growth of AI, increasing polarization, spread of misinformation. To understand this world, it is necessary that as many people as possible put on complexity glasses and investigate together how complex systems work.

I will be dealing with all these questions this year as a 'journalist-in-residence' at the IAS, the Institute for Advanced Study of the University of Amsterdam, the only Institute for Advanced Study in the Netherlands affiliated with a university.

Various scientists at this institute work on issues surrounding complexity. They are given the space to go beyond the boundaries of their discipline. To develop new ideas, conduct exciting experiments, but also to have the freedom to let things fail. Because most inventions were preceded by failures. Perhaps 99 light bulbs were developed before Edison patented his light bulb, which subsequently became the standard worldwide.

If the IAS is the ecosystem of scientists who are all concerned with complex systems in their own way, then I can't wait to discover which collective noun best suits this group of researchers.

Published in De Groene Amsterdammer on February 16, 2024. Translated by the Institute for Advanced Study.