I read John Salvatier’s post Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail some years back, and then couldn’t find it afterwards. It’s an amazing piece, which starts out looking at the subtle complexity of a ‘simple’ task, building a set of stairs. I found it again when it turned up on metafilter:
At every step and every level there’s an abundance of detail with material consequences… But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.
It’s a thought-provoking piece of writing. Metafilter also linked to a good related post, Why everything might have taken so long
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