 New work, more generally on the problem modeling systems at widely different scales (10+ orders of magnitude), in nano chemistry and in materials science, brings some hope that the all-or-nothing dichotomy between reduction and emergence can be somewhat blunted. As noted, a question of real philosophical interest concerns how to understand the relative autonomy of theories and models at large scales. (Why, again, are the continuum equations so safe for large scale modeling?) Contemporary work in applied mathematics on so-called homogenization theory is beginning to provide interesting connections across these widely separated scales. (Torquato 2002; Phillips 2001)