Early on, Mehta thought Gore was ignoring important details about microbial environments, but Mehta concedes that these details have proved less important than he believed. “What’s interesting and impressive about the work is that they show that many, many different phenomena — pH changes, competition for nutrients — can all be captured using these simple phenomenological models, at least in systems where you have a few species. This is a true and tried reductionism of the sort that’s served well in physics.”

• Uncategorized