New order emerges when all elements within a given system synchronize. Their cooperation creates a synergic relationship among them, elevating the quality and functionality of the network to the whole which is greater than sum of the parts. We have all experienced this holistic, cooperative effect when among large groups of people at concerts, games, political demonstrations, or religious events. To help explain this concept further, I will use excerpts from Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order (2003) by Steven Strogatz.

    “At the heart of the universe is a steady, insistent beat: the sound of cycles in sync. It pervades nature at every scale from the nucleus to the cosmos. Every night along the tidal rivers of Malaysia, thousands of fireflies congregate in the mangroves and flash in unison, without any leader or cue from the environment. Trillions of electrons march in lockstep in a superconductor, enabling electricity to flow through it with zero resistance. In the solar system, gravitational synchrony can eject huge boulders out of the asteroid belt and toward Earth; the cataclysmic impact of one such meteor is thought to have killed the dinosaurs.     Even our bodies are symphonies of rhythm, kept alive by the relentless, coordinated firing of thousands of pacemaker cells in our hearts. And that raises a profound mystery: scientists have long been baffled by the existence of spontaneous order in the universe. The law of thermodynamics seems to dictate the opposite, that nature should inexorably degenerate toward a state of greater disorder, greater entropy. Yet all around us we see magnificent structure-galaxies, cells, ecosystems, human beings, that have somehow managed to assemble themselves. This enigma bedevils all of science today.  The tendency to synchronize  is one of the most pervasive drives in the universe, extending from atoms to animals, from people to planets. All the examples are variations on the same mathematical theme: self-organization, the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos.”  

The best modern example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts is the function of light in the form of a laser. The intense, coherent, needle-thin beam of a laser is a result of trillions of atoms emitting light waves in sync. The atoms themselves are no different from those in an ordinary light bulb; the trick is in the way they cooperate. Instead of cacophonous light of different colors and phases, laser light is one color and one phase, a chorus singing the same note. The resulting laser is composed of the atoms that have the same color and phase, which when combined makes them into a beam that is more than what the individual atoms are capable of. The integrative, synchronized, and emergent behavior of the components results in the holistic, cooperative, and qualitative characteristic of nonlinear networks. The synergistic character of nonlinear systems is also what makes them so rich. Every major unsolved problem in science, from consciousness to cancer to the collective craziness of the economy, is nonlinear. As is evident in a laser, the synchronized whole has a quality and functionality which none of the individual components had.