The physicist Brian Cox, presenter of the BBC2 series Wonders of The Solar System has teamed up with the Big Bang science fair to launch the Big Bang Lesson. Brian will visit one school somewhere in the UK and deliver a lesson based around the solar system.
Many things in life are more than the sum of their parts. Whether its the behaviour of crowds of people, flocking birds or shoaling fish, the unpredictable patterns of the weather or the complex structure of the Internet, it's often the interaction between things, rather than the things themselves, that generates complexity. It's a challenge to science, whose traditional approach of taking things apart and looking at the individual bits doesn't work when faced with emergent complexity. But there are mathematical techniques to understand this phenomenon.