On July 4^th in 2012 I went to see Lake Michigan one more time and closed a chapter of my life and my education in Michigan. It was the best part of my life and an exhilarating experience. In the small town Ann Arbor, I was able to sink in and began to learn about myself and make sense of my life. At the University of Michigan my mind underwent a transformation through interactions with many great people. Time has its own logic; it takes what it needs to get here. Even if the few ideas I got are the only achievement I have made in the past seven years, I am happy with my achievement. Got to continue trying.

Today I listened to Jonathan Lee, accidentally. Lee is a Taiwanese musician and an influential figure in the world of Mandarin popular music. He has been greatly respected by musicians who would call him their big brother at the peak of his career in the 1980s and 1990s. Lee turned 60 this year; time does not bias against anybody (even a celebrity), leaving obvious marks on his physical appearance. From 2012 to 2015 Lee embarked on a world tour Now That I Cannot Keep Youth, Let Me Be an Uncle, which turned out to be a huge success. Thus, the big brother has transformed himself to an uncle, successfully.

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Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Laureate in physics who discovered the particle quarks, passed away in Santa Fe on May 24th 2019. So, another giant in complexity science is gone, after we had lost John Holland in 2015.

I had met with the father of quarks three times. The first time it was at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). I was still a PhD student, and it was near the end of my PhD study at the University of Michigan. I attended a meeting at SFI on stability of economic systems, fortunately with professor John Holland, the father of Genetic Algorithm . It was my first visit to SFI, the epicenter of complexity study, and as a student of complexity, I approached Santa Fe much like a pilgrim.

During this visit I also got to meet some other legends in Mitchell Waldrop’s popular book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. I read Waldrop’s book again and realized that Murray Gell-Mann had a vision on sustainability even back then. In his vision a sustainable human society is adaptable, robust, and resilient to lesser disasters, can learn from mistakes and allows for growth in the quality of human life instead of just the quantity of it. He said the transformation to a sustainable society requires understanding economic, social, and political forces that are deeply intertwined. That was exactly what I was trying to do with my dissertation. He had helped set up the World Resource Institute. From Waldrop’s book I also rediscovered Brian Arthur’s insightful remarks on policy which would become part of a new course Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and Policy I taught later at George Mason University.

About my pilgrimage to SFI, I will say no more today but attach a piece I wrote in 2010 immediately following my visit.

A pilgrimage to SFI

When I visited SFI the second time to attend a workshop on Gateways to Emergent Behavior in Science and Society, I already got my “union card” and became an assistant professor with the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason. I co-chaired a session Toward a Habitable Planet. My mind at that time was very much occupied by the mystery of the brain and had an aha moment on a walk. At lunch, I asked Murray Gell-Mann what he thought about the brain and the mind. He spoke to me candidly that he had not thought deeply into this matter.

My last encounter with the father of Quarks was in Singapore at a meeting More is Different organized by the Complexity Institute at Nanyang Technological University. At the reception he recognized me sitting at a table while walking out on the corridor and stopped to say hello. As usual his dense, gray curly hair seemed to contain wisdom and whimsy, but I noticed his health was deteriorating and felt sad. I didn’t want to burden him with long, serious conversations.

Just a few days ago, at the National Portrait Gallery I saw a small photo of him in an exhibition titled In Mid-Sentence among a collection of photos of politicians, artists, and entertainment stars and wondered how he was doing. I thought the gallery should put on better photos of him. Much has been said and I don’t need to add on anything about how great he was as a physicist, or what a broad and fine intellect he had. He had come across my mind always as charming and cool.

In fact many scientists are charming and cool in some way, but this side of scientists is unseen to the public. The Portrait Gallery had another exhibition American Cool several years ago. It included images of politicians, artists, and entertainment stars but not a single scientist. Maybe I should propose to the Portrait Gallery to set up an exhibition Scientist Cool.

Sunlight on the Atlantic is warm in May, but I don’t know how to capture warmth with a camera. Under my feet waves surge one after another making clear marks on the beach that overlap each other without a regular pattern, interlacing with my small footprints. At the far end of the ocean it is uniformly thick and deep; I cannot make out anything there even with binoculars. A couple of fish got strangled on the beach. Their bodies struggle to make a move to no avail, and their hard shell proves to be useless on the sand. I pick them up and put them back to the water. I am not sure if they will be able to get back to the deep ocean, though. It is kind of assuring to see strangers still smile at each other in this small place called Bethany. I smile back at everybody I run into.