Tired of the predictable 'clockwork' nature of the physical world as defined by Newtonian laws? Then you'll find a friend in Robert B. Laughlin. He suspects the fact that Newtonian laws break down at quantum levels and fail to predict all phases between states is evidence the physical world is still highly mysterious. Instead, he proposes we focus on the emergent properties of matter, or how atoms organise themselves, rather than 'reductionist' thinking with its eagerness to marry everything to an equation.

Laughlin states the Quantum Hall effect, "where the electron charge can be broken into pieces through self organisation of phases," is an example of organisation in nature. (The author shared a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998 for his work on the Quantum Hall effect, which also proved the existence of new phases in matter other than solid, liquid and gas.) The same principle of organisation is also found in superconductors, he says, before suggesting that Einstein's theory of relativity could be emergent; that is, it's OK on large scales but fails on small ones.

The problem with reductionism, Laughlin says, is that it's susceptible to "Dark Corollaries", which obscure the inconclusive nature of many experiments. One of these corollaries he has dubbed 'the Deceitful Turkey', to describe the phantom breakthrough that feels so tantalisingly close but will always be beyond one's grasp,
no matter what computer power or technology is at hand.

Witty asides and his New Yorker-style cartoons flesh out Laughlin as a man who could almost have taken away a second Nobel Prize for wryness, and he indulges himself as the book progresses. That's not a complaint, but there is also a sarcasm in Laughlin's language which occasionally darkens the tone. Maybe he feels it will help him popularise emergence in what he claims is its time of ascendancy. Or maybe an editor should have suggested he tone it down a bit. Twice he uses the phrase "intellectually mugged" to describe how students and even his own son sometimes go away from discussions with him feeling battered. He even admits to once setting a physics exam question so difficult that not one student could solve it. What did that prove?