'Life is so complicated!' How often have you heard yourself or someone else say this while tackling the daily challenges of job, family, technology, bureaucracy, death, taxes and booking that holiday in the Maldives? And of course, there is the debt crisis in Europe destroying your portfolio.
Complexity reigns in the real world, and increasingly in the world of science, too. Just last week, Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, reported that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva travelled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. This cast doubt on one of the very pillars of physics and Einstein's theory of relativity - that nothing travels faster than light.
In physics, mathematics and other scientific disciplines, complexity theory is gaining sway and changing the way we analyse the universe.
It was not always this way. Until the second half of the 20th century, scientists used a reductionist approach to explain the laws of nature, breaking things down into elementary forms. The dominant idea was that laws govern the behaviour of all animate and inanimate matter in the universe.
By understanding how fundamental particles work, we understand how our universe came into being. By understanding cells and molecules, we will understand the origin of life.
That is why today, Big Science builds larger and costlier equipment to break down smaller particles. Witness the Euro7.5 billion (HK$80 billion) Large Hadron Collider being built in Geneva, for instance. And increasingly powerful computers are deployed to decode the mystery of how cells are formed.