# Science and Method

*Poincaré · Complexity & Systems, Origins · Flammarion · 1908 · Open access*

The oldest work on this map, and the headwater of the complexity mainline: the mainstream genealogy of complexity science begins here, before cybernetics and independent of it. The technical origin sits behind this book: Poincare's 1890 prize memoir on the three body problem, which set out to show the solar system's stability and discovered instead that three mutually attracting bodies admit no general closed form solution, and that some trajectories tangle beyond any possibility of long range forecast. The memoir's own history enacts the point: the first printed version contained an error, and it was the correction that exposed the tangled behaviour, so the mathematics of unpredictability was discovered by someone being wrong carefully. Science and Method (1908) is where Poincare states the consequence for general readers, in the chapter on chance: in certain systems, differences in initial conditions too small to measure produce differences in outcome too large to ignore, so that even with deterministic laws, prediction becomes impossible. Determinism and predictability, which the clockwork universe had treated as one thing, come apart here, half a century before Lorenz rediscovered the same structure in weather models and named an era after it. For this corpus the inheritance is the licence under the whole complexity strand: when the map's articles insist that organisational outcomes cannot be forecast from initial conditions, that interventions are probes rather than predictions, and that the same action taken twice lands differently, this is the mathematics that says such claims can be literally true rather than rhetorically convenient. One honesty note: Poincare was not doing complexity science, and reading him as its founder is retrospective adoption. He is the root the field later claimed, which is exactly how intellectual ancestry usually works, and the claiming is documented rather than disguised here. The book itself was written for lay readers, remains genuinely readable, and is free in full at Project Gutenberg.

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## Neighbours (4)

- [Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/cilliers-1998.md) (paper)
- [Science and Complexity](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/weaver-1948.md) (paper)
- [Complexity](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/complexity.md)
- [Complexity: A Guided Tour](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/mitchell-2009.md) (paper)