Seeing science as a complex adaptive system allows us to be sympathetic to Wolfram’s idea of a new kind of science. It also allows us to see why the practice of complexity is at a Promethean moment. At the present time, our science broadly accepts the rules of engagement set by the experimentalists: experimental science still controls the way we think about complex systems. This is a deeply cultural problem with a history at least Newtonian and probably Platonic. It has to do with a philosophical belief in elegance, that the universe will be ultimately explicable in simple elegant ways, that behind the messiness of the world there lies the music of the spheres. This has driven mathematics and physics, in particular, into a compact from which we struggle to emerge. I see some hope for change—in computer-aided theorem proving, for example—but I also see a great reluctance to abandon the belief of an underlying simplicity in the way the universe works.

We see the belief at work whenever we see a complex systems model that deliberately keeps itself simple under the guise of tractability, or insists on simplified outputs, or whenever we see modelling that dwells on complex dynamics emerging from simple interactions. But make no mistake, it is a belief, and it holds us back. It reinforces the idea of a normative science to which complex systems science is subordinate. Science needs to renegotiate its concord with mathematics, to the ultimate benefit of both, before we can move on to our new kind of science.

What we would move on to is what I call deep complexity. It promises to be a science that accepts the contingent complexity of the world, adapts its ideas about explanation, prediction and control as goals for science, and learns a new concept of understanding. However, I am not talking about some post-modern deconstructed science, where everything is relative, where there is no such thing as absolute truth. I am talking about a new kind of science that completely fulfils science’s necessary and sufficient conditions as a complex adaptive system. But, be assured, it will be very different from the logical positivist view. It will be complex not simple, drawing its strength more from the coming ubiquity and transcendent power of computing rather than the analytical power of mathematics. It will be a cooperative, even symbiotic, endeavour with the net as it evolves into a richer complex adaptive system. And the understanding it creates will not always be global—the gold standard of experimental science—but local and embedded, but still connected—still a part of the fabric of science.

This new science will relate to observational and experimental science on its own terms, not those dictated by the logical positivists. It will be data and parameter rich, drawing on both observational and experimental science, but in much more fluid ways than at present. This is the new science waiting to be born. We happy few, we band of brothers, we see our science poised, at a moment of profound change, but held back by the culture of normative science. What will bring on the birth, what will provide the push, I think, is a change in the interactions: firstly, those between science and the world—the demand for a new sort of science for a newly complex fully connected world; and secondly, those within science—the emergence of a set of tools that allows complex systems science to renegotiate its relationship with the rest of science.

Thus the abject failure of normative science to deal with the complex problems of a connected world will provide a push from the world. And the beginning of grid computing and sensor webs will allow for the first time for big complex problems to be modeled in their full complexity, but will also involve a renegotiated relationship with observational and experimental science and encourage the liberation of complexity science. The agenda is huge—to change science, to change society, to understand wholly new classes of problems, and to do that with new non-human partners. And we are few—perhaps a few thousands worldwide. But once, the calculus was understood and used by even fewer. We might be few, we band of brothers, but the battle needs to be joined today, so that tomorrow we can say with Henry:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.