Here, the
Reinventing Physics: the Search for the Real Frontier.
By ROBERT B. LAUGHLIN
A few years ago I had occasion to engage my father-in-law, a retired academician, on the subject of the collective nature of physical law. We had just finished playing bridge late one afternoon and were working on a couple of gin and tonics in order to escape discussing movies of emotional depth with our wives. My argument was that reliable cause-and-effect relationships in the natural world have something to tell us about ourselves, in that they owe this reliability to principles of organization rather than microscopic rules. The laws of nature that we care about, in other words, emerge through collective self-organization and really do not require knowledge of their component parts to comprehend and exploit.
After listening carefully, my father-in-law declared that he did not understand. He had always thought that laws cause organization, not the other way around. He was not even sure the reverse made sense. I then asked him whether legislatures and corporate boards made laws or were made by laws, and he immediately saw the problem. He pondered it for a while, and then confessed that he was now deeply confused about why things happen and needed to think more about it.
Exactly so.
There's only one small edit.
Looks promising.
This is sweet:
The conversation focused on the question of whether physics was a logical creation of the mind or a synthesis built on observation.
That's why I like Liebniz's idea of monads:
His philosophical contribution to metaphysics is based on the Monadology, which introduces Monads as "substantial forms of being", which are akin to spiritual atoms, eternal, indecomposable, individual, following their own laws, not interacting ("windowless") but each reflecting the whole universe in pre-established harmony (a historically noteworthy expression of panpsychism).
I visualize mirrored spheres. The problem of a universe of individuals is how they communicate...
Uh, vibrations. (Sorry about the 60's visualizations.)
Or this:
The worldview motivating my uncle's attitude toward Yosemite, and arguably also Brian Greene's attitude toward physics, is expressed with great clarity in John Horgan's The End of Science (Addison-Wesley, 1996), in which he argues that all fundamental things are now known and there is nothing left for us to do but fill in details. This pushes my experimental colleagues beyond their already strained limits of patience, for it is both wrong and completely below the belt. The search for new things always looks like a lost cause until one makes a discovery. If it were obvious what was there, one would not have to look for it.
(emphasis miine)
I once knew an art world gallery guy who said that all the art that is good is known since all schools are combed over by dealers and galleries. In other owrds, all stones have been turned over on the beach of the art world. That was in the hey day of the tech boom.
The article ends this way:
The important laws we know about are, without exception, serendipitous discoveries rather than deductions. This is fully compatible with one's everyday experience. The world is filled with sophisticated regularities and causal relationships that can be quantified, for this is how we are able to make sense of things and exploit nature to our own ends. But the discovery of these relationships is annoyingly unpredictable and certainly not anticipated by scientific experts. This common-sense view continues to hold when the matter is examined more carefully and quantitatively. It turns out that our mastery of the universe is largely a bluff -- all hat and no cattle. The argument that all the important laws of nature are known is part of this bluff.
Thus the end of knowledge and the closing of the frontier it symbolizes is not a looming crisis at all, but merely one of many embarrassing fits of hubris in civilization's long history. In the end it will pass away and be forgotten. Ours is not the first generation to struggle to understand the organizational laws of the frontier, deceive itself that it has succeeded, and go to its grave having failed. One would be wise to be humble, like the Irish fisherman observing quietly that the sea was so wide and his boat so small. The wildness we all need to live, grow, and define ourselves is alive and well, and its glorious laws are all around.
Ah yes. Hubris.
THAT'S where we go wrong.
Posted by Dennis at February 9, 2005 8:45 PM
Hey Dennis
Here is my first foray into the blogosphere. I sat down to write a brief response to "exactly so" and ended with a petit-manifesto, revealing my own pseudo-scientific affectations.
On the concept that; "The laws of nature that we care about, in other words, emerge through collective self-organization and really do not require knowledge of their component parts to comprehend and exploit"... is exactly my interest in following new physics (complexity, self-organization, emergence, chaos, etc.) as an artist. These new concepts for understanding our reality overturn Modernisms slaving "isms": determinism, mechanism, reductionism and materialism. The new concepts reveal that the principle of self-organisation extends from the atom to the universe as a whole. They refute the nihilistic view that our place in the universe is accidental, tangental, absurd and discontinuous with the rest of nature. The general rule is that the more creative the universe the more potential for benevolence and suffering. Catastrophe, chaos, sudden mass-extinction's are as deep essentials as growth organization and beauty. The view of the cosmic process is decidedly mixed. One can be optimistic about the overall process, and pessimistic about the details - "tragic optimism". Like Bush's invasion of Iraq.
As a painter in particular, breaking from modernisms constraints and following a cosmo-genic model is liberating in it's potential to create new forms. From viewing jpegs of your paintings, I would have to say you are out front using this new model. Your artistic practice through a scientific prism brings in a kind of "savageness", a raw relation to truth thoughout the human condition. What they reveal, (actually in conjunction with your blog), is that our biological existence, social world, economy and religious traditions tell a compelling story of interrelatedness. Although I have been watching the evolution of your paintings through your blog for only a few short months, perhaps the most powerful aspect of your work is that they are ego-less in their generosity of form. Contrast this with the great modern masters, whose very hallmark was the Greenbergian philosophy of dis-connection from the outside world and the myth of the individual genius. It drove almost each and every one of them off the cliff when they thought they reached the zero-degree of possibility. And still, still the artworld clings to this myth. Why? Because it's easier to sell.
And finally a response to this statement because this view is so widely accepted and promoted: "I once knew an art world gallery guy who said that all the art that is good is known since all schools are combed over by dealers and galleries. In other words, all stones have been turned over on the beach of the art world. " The reason this view is so widely promoted is because it keeps those promoters in power. And the reason that it is so widely accepted by artists is that it gives artists a way out, an excuse for not being loved for their work in the grand tradition of romantic suffering. How very 20th century! One index of the most valuable art is its invitation to the imagination: can it be legitimately read the most number of ways? According to a basic law of Complexity science, ?more is different?: things pushed far-from-equilibrium suddenly organize at a higher level, i.e., there is much work to do. Having new tools of technology allow artists the power to not only create but to market their personal world view. (See Dennis Hollingsworth.us/). Your art and blog shows us how.
For a great book on this subject see "LINKED", by Albert-Laszlo Brabasi on the new science of network systems. Brilliant!
Hey Doug:
Nice to read your comment! I was combing through the blog to title the works on paper (I harvest the names from the blog, a way to apply sincerity without the problem of self consciousness that usually comes with it) and I bumped into your comment.
Thanks for your careful attention, let me reread and respond in kind a little later with a blogpost. Right now, I'm fire drilling. The trouble with the advent of comment spam is that I don't get to find the real comments within the thicket of nasty spam that floods this blog every day (about 2-300 daily). It's a real bummer.
All the best,
-D