Emergent Laws

[soulfire78]

I've just returned form a great lecture sponsored by the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy. They invited Dr. Robert Laughlin, a thoretical physicist and 1998 Nobel Prize recipient, to speak on laws, the downfalls of particle physics and emergent properties of larger organizations.

A large portion of his thories were far over my head. However, he presented it in such a way that even I was able to glean a few things from his lecture (VERY happy about that).

Here are the main ideas presented by Dr. Laughlin:

Reductionist thinking in science is reaching its endpoint. New ways of looking at our physical world must be considered. As we disect further and further reaching studies of ever smaller particles, the way these particles behave in aggregate is lost. He likened this to staring at a Monet. From a distance, the picture makes sense, it has beauty and structure. But as you move much closer, the meaning is lost. None of the individual strokes maintain the properties of the picture as a whole.

This was also likened to the law of rigidity. In aggregate, molecules or atoms can form structures that are rigid. However, as these structures are reduced to their components, the emergent property of rigidity is lost. Since a law is considered to be "always true," the law of rigidity becomes an emergent law of rigidity. Basically, by looking at this in a reductionist frame of mind, you lose the meaning. You cannot come to an understanding of the properties that dictate rigidity in a structure.

Dr. Laughlin further states that Newtons laws of motion and quantum mechanics are not actually laws that are always true. Instead, they are emergent properties that occur only when large amounts of matter collect together!

To take a page from the program, Dr. Laughlin states that "The central task of theoretical physics in our time is no longer to write down the ultimate equations but rather to catalog and understand emergent behavior in its many guises, including potentially life itself."

He has a book that has just been published - A Different Universe - I think it's going to be my next read!

I just thought I'd share. Like I said, this isn't my area of study, but I found it fascinating all the same.

[darkknight]

ultimate equations

quite interesting....