Scientists spend their careers trying to understand the world, but a new study suggests they have surprisingly different ...

This past September, SFI Director of Experimental Projects, Caitlin McShea, and SFI Research Fellow Tony Eagan co-hosted the Santa Fe Institute’s second annual Synthetic Imagination event, a multi-day ...

SFI External Professor Luís Bettencourt and co-author Nicholas Marchio, both researchers at the University of Chicago, use the first complete dataset of more than 415 million buildings across 50 ...

The sudden emergence of witch trials in early modern Europe may have been fueled by one of humanity's most significant intellectual milestones: the invention of the printing press in 1450. “Cities ...

“. . . the true heir to Melville and Faulkner." —Harold Bloom, literary critic. "Today feels to me like a terrible disaster where many of us lost a good friend, the Santa Fe Institute lost one of its ...

In anticipation of Cormac McCarthy’s newest books, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” (Knopf, 2022), former SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales recollects McCarthy’s long and ongoing friendship with ...

External Faculty are central to SFI’s identity as a world-class research institute. They enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex-systems science, and connect us to ...

Philip Anderson, a theoretical physicist who wrote rules that dictate the strange behavior of condensed matter and lent his deep intuition to problems beyond physics, died on March 29, 2020. He was 96 ...

The simulation hypothesis — the idea that our universe might be an artificial construct running on some advanced alien computer — has long captured the public imagination. Yet most arguments about it ...

In paper after paper over 25 years, Geoffrey West and his SFI colleagues methodically built a case for universal, mathematical scaling laws common to biological and human social systems. West’s ...

SFI External Professor C. Brandon Ogbunu (Yale University) received a 2024 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, ...