In the spring of 1957, the Weinbergs moved to New York for his job at Columbia University, where important experimental work had taken place throught the 1950s. He writes some (largely unimportant) papers on symmetry principles and weak interactions. His first encounter with Murray Gell-Mann gets off to a rocky start. Weinberg starts building a network of colleagues and friends. He misses the chance of tenure at Columbia, so rather than stay for another year as a postdoc, he decides to take up a research position at Berkeley. Before he leaves, he submits his paper on renormalization and infinities.

This chapter deals with McCarthy’s relationship to the Santa Fe Institute, a scientific think tank at which he has been a fellow for many years. This institute, founded by Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann, is known for cutting-edge research into a variety of scientific disciplines and for cross-disciplinary interaction that leads to new possibilities in scientific discovery. McCarthy has long been interested in science, and the Santa Fe Institute’s exploration of complex systems and chaos theory have informed much of his later work, specifically No Country for Old Men and The Road. Central to this chapter is McCarthy’s engagement with the idea of “emergence,” which suggests that out of the totality of individually simple interactions between constituents of a complex system there emerge higher order phenomena which are not reducible to the original components. This provocative idea finds its way into McCarthy’s thought and work.