Starclouds

I’ve just gotten back from the town of Almen in The Netherlands, where I attended a symposium held by the Institute Para Limes: a new organization that is hoping to establish itself as a European counterpart of the Santa Fe Institute in the United States. (I described the founding of SFI at great length in my book Complexity, which I guess is why I was invited.) IPL isn’t necessarily going to focus on Santa Fe’s specialty, complex adaptive systems, although that does seem to be a starting point. But IPL is meant to have the same kind of focus on transdisciplinary science-getting physicists talking to biologists, computer scientists talking to demographers, and so on. The idea is that real-world problems like global warming or sustainable development couldn’t care less how universities are organized into departments; they have to be addressed from every perspective at once. So let’s give researchers a place where it’s easy to work on cross-cutting problems together.

To hear the organizers tell it, the need for such a refuge is even more acute in Europe than it is here. Not only are the disciplines and sub-disciplines even more balkanized and the universities even more bureaucratic, but the national rivalries and language barriers are still very real. Thus IPL’s double-duty, multi-language name: “para limes” is a Greek-Latin hybrid for “across borders.”

IPL was organized in 2004 with physicist Jan Wouter Vasbinder as director, and a list of “founding fathers” that includes five European Nobel laureates. It has gotten enough funding from the Dutch government and elsewhere to start restoration work on a permanent home: a 14^th-century monastery in the town of Doesburg, in central Holland. It has held a series of workshops on several broad research themes, including Genes, Infections and Epidemics, Complexity, Evolution and Learning, Critical Transitions in Complex Systems, and Conceptual Neuroscience. (Another workshop on Robustness is planned for this autumn.) And now it has held this week’s conference. Science without boundaries (October 7-10), had 70 participants, including SFI stalwarts Brian Arthur and John Holland, as well as SFI president Geoffrey West and two Nobelists: biologist Sidney Brenner and physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft. The goal was to review what had come out of the smaller workshops, reach some kind of consensus on IPL’s future agenda-and, not incidentally, introduce IPL to the wider world.

I can only wish them well-and not just because rural Holland was so lovely and IPL such a gracious host. The world needs many more places where people can grapple with problems from every perspective at once. The institute has made an impressive start. But the challenge, as always, is money: IPL will need a lot more of it, public and private, to succeed. Here’s hoping they can find it.