Thread: More is Different. I just heard that physicist Philip Anderson passed away a month ago. I knew him from his paper, "More is Different" (Science, 1972). This was one of the foundational papers for complexity science. 
2/ Anderson was one of the founders of the Santa Fe Institute. See their obituary: santafe.edu/news-center/ne… The basic point of "More is different" is that increases in size or quantity bring about qualitative differences. I use this principle in my book #PastUrbanLife
3/ My pal and partner-in-crime Jose Lobo noted that the "more is different" principle explains why physicists are interested in working with archaeologists: we both acknowledge this process and use it analytically. This is one reason I am so big on population size...
4/ Larger cities and settlements are DIFFERENT than smaller ones. Size matters. This graph is from books by Bodley and Morris. But, one of the best things about Philip Anderson's Science paper is the ending.....
5/ Anderson quotes a conversation in Paris in the 1920s. F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The rich are different from us." Ernest Hemingway: "Yes, they have more money." Or, maybe, big cities are different from towns. Yes, they have more people. You may think this is simplification...
6/ Of course this is simplifying things. But when you think about the fact that big cities have more commerce, bigger buildings, more crime, more diversity, etc., my point is that they have these things BECAUSE they have more people...
7/7 And this fact is expressed in the scaling relationships identified by settlement scaling theory, whether for modern cities (also published in Science, Luis Bettencourt, 2013) or ancient cities colorado.edu/socialreactors/ Without a doubt, "More is different."
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