I will take this, from Asimov.

But my favourite quote of his, was “THE MOST EXCITING PHRASE TO HEAR IN SCIENCE, THE ONE THAT HERALDS NEW DISCOVERIES, IS NOT ‘EUREKA’ BUT ‘THAT’S FUNNY.'” https://twitter.com/quot3bot/status/1350189755531735041

I 'eard a book called Scale earlier this week, by Geoffrey West. About (roughly) growth, economies and losses of scale and Complex Adaptive Systems, which are very new to me. Yet a lot of it was oddly intuitive and even reminded me of ancient ideas about sacred geometry...

... and the golden proportion, and the self-similarity that informs architecture that pleases the eye (and that is missing from the abominations of modernism).

But one of the the things that was most notable about this new field is how much had been contributed by outsiders.

Not by idiots, loudly asserting the right of their half baked opinions and bigotries to be taken seriously, of course, but often intelligent but non-credentialed individuals, who were just following their curiosity.

Lewis Fry Richardson is an interesting case, highly intelligent, a mathematician, physicist and meteorologist who also earned a degree in psychology at 46. He would however, I sense, have been quite easily dismissed as a crank, in his day, at the point of his greatest insight.

He was a Quaker, activated by pacifism, and resigned from the Met Office when it was absorbed by the Air Ministry in charge of the RAF. He was trying to develop a theory to prove that wars were closely correlated to - and caused by - armament, when he noticed the impossibility...

of measuring coast lines. He was testing one aspect of his theory, involving the lengths of the common borders shared by combatants - and saw that coast line lengths varied massively from one account to the next. This he realised reflected the length of the measuring stick used.

He swiftly came to the conclusion that coast lines are potentially infinite, depending on the scale used to measure them.

This absurdly important and original insight which had somehow eluded mankind until this point was published in a paper entitled "The Problem of Contiguity:

: An Appendix to Statistics of Deadly Quarrels."

It really was quite an extraordinary stroke of luck that someone with the gift of seeing the implications therein, was to see it at all. This was, of course, Benoit B Mandelbrot.

The rest - Fractal Geometry, and thence (kind of) Chaos theory - is of course history.

It doesn't say as much but I get the sense that Richardson himself had endured a good deal of eye rolling until this point - even though his theory of combat is also of great value too.

Another example is Jane Jacobs, whose book The Death and Life of American Cities is regarded as *the* classic text, still, sixty odd years on. Town planning is an urgent topic, all too easily left to those with the money to make it happen. Yet she didn't even have a degree.

The book is rich with such examples (urban planning and organic urban growth, the degree to which cities are living things, is a big theme of the book) and I loved it for that. I do think it is a very important resource, cross-polination, that if anything lockdown might encourage

Since, if you can't spend time physically with colleagues anyway, you might as well cast your net a little wider than usual for your zoom calls.

West's institute in Santa Fe, though dedicated to understanding Complexity, sounds really like a fabulous intellectual playground.

Intelligent, curious people from a vastly wider range of disciplines than you might expect, for what is really a physics/biology hybrid, seem to spend their lives there in one extended coffee break, cooking up new paradigms and fusions and lenses and frames and what have you.

You may consider this short thread not only a strong recommendation for the book but also the first of a series of gentle, oblique pitches on my part that they consider establishing a bursary for a comedian in residence, forthwith.