Foreword

We stand at the frontier of a quiet, and profound, revolution (Kauffman and Roli, 2023). For four centuries, our science has been dominated by the brilliant success of the Newtonian Paradigm, a framework so powerful it has shaped our very conception of understanding. Newton taught us how to think: First, identify the relevant variables of a system—in physics, often the positions and momenta of its parts. Second, write laws of motion, typically as differential equations, that link these variables. Third specify the boundary conditions, such as the walls of a container or the edges of a billiard table. These three steps define the system’s ‘phase space’—the complete set of all possible states the system can ever occupy. It is absolutely fundamental to the Newtonian Paradigm that this phase space must be pre-statable. With the phase space known, we need only ascertain the initial conditions and, by integrating the laws of motion, we can deduce the system’s entire future and past trajectory. This paradigm is the bedrock of classical physics and, in its essential structure, it extends to quantum mechanics, where the Schrödinger equation propagates a wave function through a pre-stated space of possibilities.