First read "more is different". Solid state physicists were first to pioneer in this field: http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_di

First read "more is different". Solid state physicists were first to pioneer in this field: http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72mo... There's a very light book by some modern author that's not terrible: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software https://www.amazon.com/dp/0684868768/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_3WxpzbP55A6WW https://www.amazon.com/dp/0684868768/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_3Wxp... If you want to really dig in though you need some math: Emergence of Dynamical Order: Synchronization Phenomena in Complex Systems (World Scientific Lecture Notes in Complex Systems, Vol. 2) https://www.amazon.com/dp/9812388036/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_.Yxpzb925HPYX https://www.amazon.com/dp/9812388036/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_.Yxp... Final suggestion is most of the stuff is online at different professors websites. Warning: the field is full of meaningless fluff too, and there's a lot of qucks mixed in with genuinely interesting science.