How long does it take to read Emergence?
Emergence by Steven Johnson takes about 5 hours 17 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 17 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2001. 288 pages, about 79,200 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 48 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 17 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 18 minutes |
The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"Emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of relatively simple elements self-organizes to form more intelligent, more adaptive higher-level behavior. It's a bottom-up model, rather than being engineered by a general or a master planner; emergence begins at the ground level. Systems that at first glance seem vastly different - ant colonies, human brains, cities, immune systems - all turn out to follow the rules of emergence. In each of these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies a scale above them: ants create colonies, urbanites create neighborhoods. In the tradition of Being Digital and The Tipping Point, Steven Johnson takes readers on an eye-opening intellectual journey from the discovery of emergence to its applications."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Self-organizing systems, Systems engineering, Swarm intelligence, Long Now Manual for Civilization
