Can we battle the downsides of a rule-based world, asks a new book

Imposing order on the world is seductive, but it flattens out the diversity and rich messiness of human life. Oddly, playing by the rules may help us fight back, argues C. Thi Nguyen in The Score THIS time last year, I wrote an article for New Scientist about the perfect way to cook the classic pasta dish cacio e pepe, according to physicists. The meal's smooth, glossy emulsion of black pepper, pecorino cheese and water is hard to make lump-free. Ivan Di Terlizzi at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany and his colleagues cooked cacio e pepe hundreds of times until they produced an exacting and foolproof method. The story proved popular with readers.