One afternoon in February, Al Gore was waiting to board a commercial flight from Nashville to Miami, where he was to deliver the slide show that forms the basis of ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ his Academy Award-winning documentary on global warming. Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming. Every minute or so he flashed a microgrin at a passer-by without interrupting his oratorical flow. We had moved on to complexity theory, which Gore would really immerse himself in if only he had the time, and then to the concept of nested systems, which of course had been developed by the late psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner, when a woman in a blazing orange shirt emerged from her flight, did a double take and cried, ‘Isn’t that AL GORE?!’ There was no ignoring this fan. As she came over to thank Gore for trying to save the planet, I saw that my bags were in the way. ‘I’ll move them,’ I said; and Gore, before he could think, said, ‘No, don’t.’ Six […]