Neil Theise, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness and Being, Spiegel & Grau, 2023, 205pp.
I wish I had read this marvellous book before I reviewed Matt Strassler’s 2024 Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean which was brilliant but rather hard going for a non-physicist and Neil Theise’s book would have helped. Theise is a longstanding Professor of (diagnostic) Pathology at New York University, an acclaimed stem cell researcher, and moved on from early Judaic studies to become a Zen Buddhist. His book explains complexity theory and demonstrates its pervasiveness throughout the universe in contexts from vast cosmology described by relativity theory to the minute scale of quantum theory, from atoms, molecules and cells to living creatures including human consciousness and mathematics, meditation and mystical religion. While exploring the hard problem of consciousness, Theise found that “complexity turned out to be a science of being”.

Kym Bills February 2026

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