DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-006-0173-2

Summary
Is chemistry 'The Central Science'? Biochemistry seems presently to be more interconnected to other sciences. Many consider mathematics the central science. This article is a critical commentary that leads to a proposal for an alternative partially ordered hierarchical “framework” map of sciences.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
Perfect or almost perfect reproducibility of experiments is expected in the hard sciences, whereas multiple experiments are the standard mode in the soft sciences (e.g., biology and medicine) in order to ensure a reliable statistical basis for coping with the poorer reproducibility.
Two sciences serve as bridges between the hard and the soft sciences, namely chemistry and mathematics. Chemistry is the lingua franca of medicine and biology. Chemical language has great esthetical beauty and links the physical sciences to the biological sciences. It is an international language, a language for all the time, a language without dialects. It is a language that explains where we came from, what we were, and where the physical world will allow us to go. A demonstration of the link between chemistry and biology is demonstrated by the phenomenon of evolution. Evolution ends up being framed in terms of mutations at the chemical level of modifications in the genetic DNA-though there is much more to evolution, in terms of competition at the macro scale and the “survival of the fittest” with much elaborate mathematical modeling possible.
Chemistry is central to all sciences and is used to study biological, physical, medical and environmental phenomena as well.

Point of Strength
Dirac stated: “It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. One could perhaps describe the situation saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”
Are there universal laws ruling the behavior of Complex Systems? Which are their mathematical forms?