"A Different Universe: Revising Physics from the Bottom Down" by Robert B. Laughlin, a physics professor at Stanford and a winner of the Nobel Prize, fascinates me. I found the book by accident about a decade or so ago and was intrigued by the title. The book is about what is sometimes called "emergence" but could be called crowd behavior. Not crowds of people, though, crowds of atoms.
I read through the book once before and felt that I understood about 15% of it. The other day, a friend mentioned how much my use of the word "emergence" resonated with her. This book by Laughlin and "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software" by Steven Johnson have fed an interest in patterns that emergence or are observable at one scale or zoom level but not in more close-up looks. Laughlin's book is highly readable and draws me in quickly even though I often don't understand what he is saying.
The basic idea is that since the Greeks, thinkers and scientists have sought the basic particle of matter. Once it became clear that atoms have sub-parts and the sub-parts, I gather, are not physical entities in the usual sense of being something, thinking got more subtle. Laughlin relates much of his early discussion to phases of matter, like solid, liquid and gas. I gather that the properties of a rock or a desk, the solidity and constant shape, is a matter of the behavior of masses of atoms, behavior that "emerges" from enough (a very great many) atoms being together. A common saying among some people is that "more is different", I guess from an influential essay in 1972, that explained in many areas of the world, getting enough items together produces a result that is not inherent in any of them but emerges from the collection of a sufficient number.
Laughlin is witty and acerbic and says that many of his students have absorbed the idea that quantum mechanics and what goes on at the atomic and sub-atomic level is really weird. But he says that it is all quite straightforward if you understand it and realize that aggregates are sometimes quite different from one or two individuals. Statisticians and insurance companies make use of that idea every day but it can pop up in surprising places.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
