Opening paragraphs................

     To call a book on the development and applications of science The Pursuit of Simplicity may seem paradoxical.  Science and technology are more often viewed as the source of complication in the world than as simplifying factors.   Large numbers of educated people, even learned people, in the western world are gripped by a malaise of despair at a world that seems too complicated to understand, much less affect.   They wish that the world were more simple, more the way it used to be.  Their pursuit of simplicity begins with wanting to discard science and technology.  Rejecting science and technological progress, even if it were possible, would certainly not solve people's problems.


Edward Teller,   The Pursuit of Simplicity, 1980