ABSTRACT
The critical need for criminology, and social science in general, is to achieve a better understanding of the complexity of reality. A critical point about observation is that when something is observed, assumptions about its nature are made. The essence of the theory is that “systems naturally evolve to a critical state in which a minor event starts a chain reaction that can affect any number of elements in the system”. The theory of self-organized criticality is noteworthy because it does not depend on micro-mechanisms in order to analyze and predict the global features of systems. Developments in theoretical physics, particularly chaos theory with its work on highly complex problems, promise some insight into methods of constructing more capable criminological theories. Chaos theory arrived at a time when physics was reaching a point where normal science had lost the ability to handle new and important phenomena.
