After nearly a decade of successful and awarded editions in Copenhagen, Johannesburg and Brussels, and three previous editions of Science & Cocktails in Amsterdam with Robbert Dijkgraaf, Ewine van Dishoeck and Charlotte Hemelrijk, S&E invites Peter Sloot to talk about understanding complexity. Afterwards, chilled and smoky cocktails and live music.
The Simplicity of Complexity
Are crowds of people predictable? Can we disrupt criminal networks by taking out the kingpins? Is Oprah Winfrey more influential than you are? Can mistakes help to deliver a message faster? Are we reaching a pandemic tipping point, and if so, can we avoid it?
We live in a complex world and are surrounded by complex systems. From a biological cell, made of thousands of different molecules that work together seamlessly, to our global society; a collection of seven billion individuals that try to work and live together. These complex systems display endless signatures of order, disorder, self-organisation and self-annihilation. Understanding this complexity is one of the biggest scientific challenges of our time. In this talk we will discuss how this complexity emerges at the edge of chaos, we will peek into the collective behaviour of crowds of people, the intricacies of the immune system and the (un-)importance of the kingpins of criminal networks, all ‘magically’ emerging from the simple rules of Nature.