Introduction

Science and technology exert a mutual positive feedback action. The engines of the scientific inquiry and technological development are curiosity about natural phenomena and desire of improving human well-being. These two engines have allowed humankind to trace a long path toward the discovery of nature, which has been punctuated by two revolutionary intellectual events: the birth of philosophy in the 6th century BC, and the use of the experimental method for questioning nature, since the 17th century AD. Although science and technology have reached high peaks, there are still unexplored places. In fact, science fails to describe the so-called Natural Complex Systems exhaustively. Examples of Complex Systems are both unicellular and multicellular living beings; human brain and immune system; ecosystems; global economy; the climate and geology of our planet. This book is a contribution to the study of Complex Systems because it presents their features with multidisciplinary examples. Hopefully, the contents shown in this chapter and the following ones will inspire the inductive jumps of Dionysian scientists who should formulate the new awaited axioms for untangling Complex Systems.