Emergence in Condensed Matter and Quantum Gravity: A Nontechnical Review

This book surveys the science at a semipopular, Scientific American-level.

It is even-handed with regard to competing directions of research and philosophical positions.

It is hard to get even two people to agree on anything, yet a million billion water molecules can suddenly and abruptly coordinate to lock themselves into an ice crystal or liberate one another to billow outwards as steam.

The marvelous self-organizing capacity of matter is one of the central and deepest puzzles of physics, with implications for all the natural sciences.

Physicists in the past century have found a remarkable diversity of phases of matter-and equally remarkable commonalities within that diversity.

The pace of discovery has, if anything, only quickened in recent years with the appreciation of quantum phases of matter and so-called topological order.

The study of seemingly humdrum materials has made contact with the more exotic realm of quantum gravity, as theorists realize that the spacetime continuum may itself be a phase of some deeper and still unknown constituents.

These developments flesh out the sometimes vague concept of the emergence-how exactly it is that complexity begets simplicity.