Philip Anderson, more than any other physicist, helped pivot theoretical physics away from reductionism toward emergence as a guiding principle. Yet almost no popular-science books explore this crucial shift—an exception is www.panmacmillan.com/authors/fran... . An excerpt:

What if all the laws that we know are just effective laws, valid at certain length scales? Isn't that emergence? And does that not mean that reductionism is impossible, as we will never be able to know the real laws that lie at the origin of this flow?

From a friend of my bikig club: "Clearly, Martinis would have gotten nowhere without the help of Clarke"

The book launch took place at the magnificent Royal Institution (@ri-science.bsky.social), the cradle of science popularization.