Seeing further: the story of science & the Royal Society — 16 JOHN D.BARROW

1. 1. The world appears simple to particle physicists because they study fundamental laws, but complex to biologists and economists who study outcomes.
2. 2. Newton's laws of motion only have simple forms for privileged observers who are not accelerating or rotating relative to fixed stars, violating the Copernican principle.
3. 3. Outcomes of laws are more complex than the laws themselves because they break the symmetries that the laws possess.
4. 4. Candidate theories of everything reveal that many features once thought fundamental, like the number of forces or constants, may be random outcomes.
5. 5. Chaotic systems are not intrinsically random but exhibit extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, making long-term prediction of individual trajectories impossible.
6. 6. Self-organised criticality, exemplified by a sandpile, shows how chaotic small-scale events can produce large-scale order through avalanches of all sizes.
7. 7. String theory necessarily includes gravity and predicts a graviton, a massless spin-2 particle mediating gravity, a feature earlier TOE candidates lacked.
8. 8. Mathematics is the catalogue of all possible patterns, so it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics, but the mystery is that simple mathematics is so far-reaching.