COMPLEXITY:

(SFX: singing the alphabet)

     THE ALPHABET SEEMS A SIMPLE ENOUGH THING, 26 EASY  LETTERS. BUT THE
RULES TO PUT THEM TOGETHER AREN'T QUITE AS EASY.

     MCGUIRE: "if you take letters and put them together in random order what one has, one has
nonsense, usually, on the other hand, if you put them together in a certain order you can get some
interesting things, you can get poems, you can get plays, you can get shakespeare." 
   
  	PHYSICIST JIM MCGUIRE AT TULANE UNIVERSITY STUDIES COMPLEXITY.  ITS A
WHOLE NEW FIELD OF SCIENCE THAT TRIES TO FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT RULES AND
PATTERNS CAN TURN THE SOMETHING LIKE THE SIMPLE ALPHABET INTO THE COMPLEX
SENTENCES OF SHAKESPEARE. EXCEPT INSTEAD OF JUST THE ALPHABET, THEY'RE
TACKLING THE INTRICATE RULES THAT GOVERN NATURE AND SOCIETY: (SFX: at first just
the alphabet, then an addition of rules and sayings, crescendo, rising to incomprehensibility) 
IT GETS HARD TO FIGURE OUT WHAT'S GOING ON, AND YOU CAN UNDERSTAND WHY
TRADITIONALLY SCIENTISTS HAVE JUST IGNORED A LOT OF THE VARIABLES.  FOR
EXAMPLE, YOU CAN PREDICT WHERE A BASEBALL WILL LAND WITHOUT
INCORPORATING AIR FRICTION AND THE ROTATION OF THE EARTH. BUT THAT WON'T
WORK TO PREDICT SOMETHING AS MULTI-FACETED AS THE WEATHER OR THE STOCK
MARKET OR POLITICAL RACES. WITH SUPERFAST COMPUTERS AND DETAILED
MATHEMATICAL MODELS, THE NEW SCIENCE OF COMPLEXITY HAS TRIED TO TACKLE
SOME OF THESE HUGE SYSTEMS. AND BY TRACKING ALL THE RULES, SAYS MCGUIRE,
YOU CAN SOMETIMES GET A SIMPLE UNDERSTANDING.

     MCGUIRE:  "Every once in a while something will happen and we can see a grand pattern. It
happneed with a lot of things that led us deeper and deeper into confusion and then we looked carefully
and got enough data and we got out of it a new sense of order."