Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better

How fixed are the happenings in Nature and how are they fixed? These lectures address what our scientific successes at predicting and manipulating the world around us suggest in answer.

One—very orthodox—account teaches that the sciences offer general truths that we combine with local facts to derive our expectations about what will happen, either naturally or when we build a device to design, be it a laser, a washing machine, an anti-malarial bed net, or an auction for the airwaves.

In these...