The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1994. First ed., first printing (full number line). xviii, 392 pages: illustrations; 25 cm;,index. About fine in fine original partly transparent fine jacket. Hardcover. ISBN: 9780716725817, 9780716727255

"From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes a highly personal, unifying vision of the natural world. As a theoretical physicist, Murray Gell-Mann has explored nature at its most fundamental level. His achievements include the 1969 Nobel Prize for work leading up to his discovery of the quark - the basic building block of all atomic nuclei throughout the universe. But Gell-Mann is a man of many intellectual passions, with lifelong interests in fields that seek to understand existence at its most complex: natural history, biological evolution, the history of language, and the study of creative thinking."— Publisher ¶ Contents: Prologue: An Encounter in the Jungle; Early Light; Information and Crude Complexity; RANDomness; A Child Learning a Language; Bacteria Developing Drug Resistence; The Scientific Enterprise; The Power of Theory; What Is Fundamental?; Simplicity and Randomness in the Quantum Universe; A Contemporary View of Quantum Mechanics: Quantum Mechanics and the Classical Approximation; Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle; Quarks and All That: The Standard Model; Superstring Theory: Unification at Last?; Time's Arrows: Forward and Backward Time; Selection at Work in Biological Evolution and Elsewhere; From Learning to Creative Thinking; Superstition and Skepticism; Adaptive and Maladaptive Schema; Machines That Learn or Simulate Learning; Diversities Under Threat; Transitions to a More Sustainable World; Afterword.