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Simplexity: Where nothing is left to chance

BY JEFFREY KLUGER | Jeffrey Kluger is science editor of Time magazine and author of "Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple)". This is excerpted from the Los Angeles Times

August 6, 2008

Whoever made the sandwich Gavrilo Princip ate on June 28, 1914, has a lot to answer for. Princip had more on his mind than his lunch that day, of course. The young Bosnian was thinking about assassinating Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who had arrived in Sarajevo for a state visit.

Princip missed his first chance to shoot at the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and slunk off to have a sandwich. By pure chance, the royal procession passed directly by the cafe where Princip was eating, and this time he seized his moment, killing Ferdinand - and plunging the Continent into World War I.

The nations of Europe might well have gone to war no matter what Princip did. But going to war in the way they did, when they did, was certainly the young killer's doing.

This is an oversized example of what's known as simplexity - the idea that simple things can be surprisingly complex, and complex things can be deceptively simple. This growing field of study reveals that all manner of phenomena - epidemics, traffic, even politics - move through tiny choke points, seemingly inconsequential junction boxes that may shape history.

The United States, for instance, is on the verge of a potentially historic election, but it is the small shifts of fortune and accident that brought us to this pass. Of all the people blamed for the failures of the Bush administration, the name of Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig rarely comes up. But maybe it should. For several years he was technically the acting commissioner. George W. Bush, then part-owner of the Texas Rangers, was candid about his interest in the position. Selig dithered, Bush gave up and decided politics might be a good career.

Again and again, American history has turned on the dime of such tiny things. The Watergate conspiracy might have unraveled no matter what, but it was a strip of tape on a Watergate building office door that alerted a security guard that burglars were about.

The way small causes yield huge effects is itself only one piece of the much grander idea of simplexity, a science that is increasingly being studied at universities and institutes around the world, but nowhere more intensely than at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, where dozens of researchers from fields as diverse as economics, chemistry, physics, sociology and neuroscience study simple rules that undergird pretty much everything.

Investigators there are discovering how individual investors in a millions-strong stock market mirror the behavior of individual particles in an atomic collider, and how cars on a highway or people fleeing a burning building mimic the motion of flowing water.

No single unified rule governs all complex or simple systems, but there are a few big ones. Phase changes is one: In the same way that water flips from liquid to vapor at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, so does a stressed geological fault flip from quiescence to quake when it shifts one centimeter too far, or a crowd explodes into a riot when a single bottle is thrown. There's the concept of relaxation pathways, which models the way rivulets become rivers by flowing downhill, or how oceans give up excess heat by blasting it into the sky as fuel for a hurricane.

The most powerful of the simplexity concepts, however, is choke points - keyholes in complex systems that can sometimes shut them down entirely. The London cholera epidemic of 1854, which could have claimed thousands of lives, was stopped cold when a physician traced the contagion to a single contaminated water pump.

The streets of New York City are a web of choke points. New York urban planner Sam Schwartz likes to point out that although about 1 million cars enter and leave Manhattan every day, only about 8,000 are in use in midtown at any moment. It takes just a few hundred extra cars to gridlock the 8,000, and those in turn can bring the 1 million to a halt. Astronauts, too, talk about "single-point failures," the one small breakdown in a massively sophisticated spacecraft that can cause the machine to fail.

The same kind of breaks have brought Barack Obama and John McCain to the threshold of the Oval Office. If Jeb Bush had run a stronger race for Florida governor in 1994, would he have been better positioned than his big brother to become president in 2000? Would that have resulted in less damage to the GOP brand and teed up his party for a win in 2008? If any one of the single-point failures that doomed Al Gore in 2000 (from butterfly ballots to hanging chads to a one-vote loss in the Supreme Court) had not occurred, would Sen. Joe Lieberman, Gore's running mate, be the Democratic nominee today?

It is great men and women who determine world events - but now and again, it's sandwiches too.