A crucial criteria for an activity to being called scientific is often said to be its disinterestedness. And yet, many autobiographies by successful scientists overflow with descriptions of joy. In this presentation, I explore how two Nobel laureates in physics, Donna Strickland (2018) and Richard Feynman (1965) use 'fun' as a central concept to describe science and the life of a scientist. Several connotations of fun–independence, incorruptibility, virtuosity, approachability, exceptionality, harmlessness, open mindedness and charisma will be explored, as will several relevant contexts, such as Cold War politics (Feynman), neoliberalism, and being an "underdog" laureate (Strickland).

Antireductionism viewed as utopian and misleading oversimplifications the once popular beliefs to address the core problems of society via biological categories or attempts to reduce biological phenomena to physico-chemical processes. Within physics proper, it has been similarly skeptical about wishful hopes to arrive at the “final theory,” assuming instead that at different levels of organization and complexity, physical systems and explanation would again and again require new and fundamentally different concepts and laws. Various formulations of non-reductionist approach included the Hegelian and Marxist idea of “Transition from Quantity to Quality” or Philip Anderson’s synonymous motto “More is Different.” If not reducible to the most basic elements of physics, where would then qualitatively novel scientific concepts come from? Historical investigations have uncovered the origins of many such fundamental concepts in the transfer of linguistic metaphors from other areas, often very far outside of physics. After reviewing several important historical examples from the early modern, classical, and most recent science, the talk would specifically focus on the role of social metaphors in the development of the quantum physics of condensed matter and many-body systems. The complexity of states of freedom and non-freedom in densely packed bodies made the problem of their physical and mathematical description almost as difficult as sorting out social hierarchies and situations in the world of humans. At least, physicists’ political worldviews and existential life experiences in real societies often guided their intuitions about methods of population control and collective behavior of atoms, electrons, and ions.

Complex systems study phenomena across various fields, including physics, biology, economics, history among other disciplines. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the founder of the general theory of systems, argued that a systemic approach should apply to all phenomena. He noted that historians often resist using tools from other disciplines. Some researchers suggest using dynamic and adaptive systems models to analyze history, focusing on its dynamics and structures instead of just a chronological sequence of events and characters. This lecture explores concepts from complex systems, such as emergence, self-organization, and fractality, as they relate to the history of science and discusses tools like network theory that can support this analysis.