Simplicity and complexity

Is anything ever simple? When confronted with a complicated system, scientists typically strive to identify underlying simplicity, which we articulate as natural laws and fundamental principles. This simplicity is what makes nature appear so organized. Atomic physics, for example, approached a solid theoretical foundation when Niels Bohr uncovered the organization of electronic energy levels, which only later were redescribed as quantum wavefunctions. Charles Darwin's revolutionary idea about the "origin" of species emerged by mapping how species are organized and discovering why they came to be that way. And James Watson and Francis Crick's interpretation of DNA diffraction spectra was a discovery of the structural organization of genetic information – it was neither about the molecule's disorder (thermodynamic entropy) nor about the statistical randomness of its base-pair sequences.