James Watt took a machine invented by Christian Huygens to regulate the rotational angular velocity of a windmill blade and used it to regulate the speed of a steam engine, creating the so-called Watt centrifugal governor, which is the first cybernetic machine ever made—a system of feedback control.

On November 1, 1755 (All Saints Day), a huge series of earthquakes hit Lisbon, completely devastating the city, killing about 15% of the population (about 12,000 dwellings destroyed), many churches were destroyed, and the headquarters of the Inquisition was destroyed, and the reverberations were physically felt across Europe and culturally felt across the world.

Out of the Lisbon earthquake came two very important works: a series of papers on the causes of earthquakes by Emanuel Kant (who started as a seismologist and physicist before becoming known as a philosopher) and Voltaire's novel Candide (or The Optimist).

Dr. Pangloss was inspired by Gottfried Leibniz, a great polymath and pioneer in early computer science, who in his mathematical work derived methods for determining minima and maxima of functions and invented the calculus in order to do so, which upset Isaac Newton who thought Leibniz had stolen his work.

The principle of optimization (that of all possible paths, the path that minimizes some quantity like time, distance, or energy is taken) is one of the most powerful concepts in mathematical physics, generalized in the 19th century to Hamilton's principle or the principle of stationary action (also called the principle of least action), and is probably the most important idea in physics.

In 1856 (the same year Kant wrote his monographs on seismology), Kant also wrote in the Critique of Judgment the beautiful remark 'There will never be a Newton of the blade of grass,' which is a poetic statement that it is impossible to create a deterministic, universal theory of biological systems comparable to Newton's physics, reflecting his belief that higher-order systems require explanatory principles beyond physics.

Turner's painting of the opening of a railroad and bridge in 1844 is an allegory of thermodynamics: Turner showed the train as partially invisible/blurry because it was traveling at 30 mph (extraordinarily fast for the time), and importantly showed the interior of the steam engine (the thermodynamics), making visible the mechanism that machines work by and introducing the visual representation of thermodynamic principles.

In 1858, Darwin received a letter from Alfred Russell Wallace who was in Indonesia (Ternate) proposing the idea of natural selection, causing Darwin to fear he had been 'scooped' after 22 years of delay, so they jointly published their work, though neither attended the presentation—Lyell and Hooker presented it using the metaphor of the Watt centrifugal governor to explain natural selection as a feedback control mechanism.

Charles Babbage was a great 19th-century historian and critic/commentator on machines who traveled throughout Britain interviewing designers, industrialists, and engineers to determine how they made their machines, and aimed to build a machine that could supersede not just the skill and power of the human arm (as other machines did) but the skill and power of the human mind—what we would now call a computer.

The phrase 'complexity science' first appears in Warren Weaver's work in 1948, and by the 1960s everyone was using the term, making it not a new thing or a Santa Fe Institute invention but something that goes back at least to the 1940s.

Phil Anderson, a Nobel Prize winner and one of the founders of the Santa Fe Institute, wrote a foundational paper called 'More is Different' which addresses the concept of emergence—how problem-solving matter produces or contends with emergence—and understanding emergence is crucial for addressing contemporary world problems.

Reductionism (exemplified by Leibniz and Steven Weinberg) claims that to understand the temporal evolution of phenomena at every level of a hierarchy, one must look at the most reduced level, making higher-level phenomena epiphenomena—this is 'a manifestly false statement' as demonstrated by the mathematical example of Fermat's proof.

In Krakow's field of evolutionary biology and complexity science, there is work by Deborah Gordon on 'a more realistic approach to understanding economic systems than the simplifications of equilibrium Game Theory,' suggesting that complexity science approaches are being applied to economic systems.

Machine learning and large language models will be very important ingredients in future science, but the hype around them (claiming they will solve climate, poverty, and disease) represents 'simplemindedness' and 'Dr. Pangloss speaking English'—applying reductionist thinking to complex multifactorial problems.

Phil Anderson's statement that 'the arrogance of the past physicist and his intensive research may be behind us' (referring to reductionist physicists) but 'we have yet to recover from that of some molecular biologists determined to try to reduce everything about the human organism to only chemistry, from the common cold and all mental disease to the religious instinct' indicates the persistence of reductionist thinking across scientific fields.

In response to a question about whether the lecture distinguished physics from complexity, Krakow clarifies that the distinction is 'necessary but not sufficient'—physics is necessary for understanding complex phenomena, but physics alone is insufficient; something must happen beyond Hamilton's principle to explain the complex world.

In response to a question about whether emergence can be optimized, with the questioner noting that natural selection requires an optimal mutation frequency (too much mutation causes breakdown, too little causes insufficient variation), Krakow acknowledges it's an interesting idea but is uncertain how plausible the analogy is, though SFI has done work on optimization of mutation rates.

Leibniz's fundamental error was ontological reductionism: because extremization of an action is true in physics, he believed it must be true everywhere—a direct implication of his view that physics is how God operates—and therefore everything observed must happen for a good reason, which is the reductionist position that to understand the complex world (cultural world), one must understand it in terms of principles of physics.

Emergence means that different levels of explanation appear to be supported by mechanisms of protection that allow rigorous explanations to be provided at almost an infinite number of distinct levels, making poetry operating according to its own rules every bit as rigorous as mathematical physics.

In the 18th century, Lisbon was extraordinarily prosperous because it had pillaged the rest of the world for 200 years in what was euphemistically called the Age of Exploration, was extraordinarily pious and religious under the iron grip of the Inquisition, had little regard for the enlightenment occurring elsewhere, and had a population of about a quarter million people.