Those who enjoyed this should check out Roger Lewin's "Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos". It's a bit dated now but covers the founding of the Santa Fe Ins

Those who enjoyed this should check out Roger Lewin's "Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos". It's a bit dated now but covers the founding of the Santa Fe Institute, which was more or less founded to answer an even more fundamental question: what are the varieties of persisting configurations of information that we can describe (ideally, mathematically). (Any persisting state of matter we can recognize must also be a state of information... But we can race ahead in discovering data configurations before we identify physical phenomena that embody then!) One of the more compelling insights in that book are parallel discoveries by Wolfram and others about ways of categorizing systems into high entropy and low entropy states -- plus a thin membrane of stable configurations in between that admit both constant change and useful summary.