The Emergent Universe Project

I just came across this site and thought it might be of interest to some of you...

Quote :

We used to think that if we understood the smallest building blocks of the world (such as atoms or cells), then we would understand the universe. That turns out not to be true. In fact, we find that the whole is larger than the sum of its parts, or that more is different.

In many diverse examples, in all corners of the universe, the interaction of simple parts creates emergent behavior—the behavior of a system that differs from the behavior of its individual parts.

The Emergent Universe Project (EUP) aims to explain principles of emergence to science-interested learners age 14 and up. Some of our projects also focus specifically on high school and university students, scientists, or cross-disciplinary audiences such as artists, philosophers, and architects.

The EUP is a collaborative between the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM), senior staff from the Exploratorium, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and the Science Museum of Minnesota, and other informal science educators.

http://www.emergentuniverse.org/emp/