Monday, July 9, 2007
Cosmological Detour
I have recently read a number of enjoyable books with some cosmology in them. I'll post the review for the most recent one in a few days. In the meantime, this month's bibliography:
The overlap between the ideas in these books is extraordinary, and reading them all together yields some insight not to the actual structure of space-time, but rather to the myriad possibilities that we might not completely understand.
The first insight is one that plenty of other writers have already commented upon, but it bears repeating: both simplicity and complexity can (and do) result from very simple systems. In fact, many (most?) systems have aspects of both. E.g. Paired oscillators, cellular automata, Lorenz attractors, and (yes, yes) any system sufficiently powerful to allow self-reference (e.g. strange loops).
This notion is not entirely dissimilar from some points Wolfram made in his grand opus A New Kind of Science, though this was not the first place such insight was noted (not even Wolfram's own first time noting the behaviors).
The second insight might be obvious to some, but still bears stating: behavior of low-level components of a system are not predictive of the system's high-level function, and vice-versa. E.g. neurons do not explain thought, thought does not explain neurons.
I would like to draw the attention of particle physicists to this second insight. Just because a system behaves in a manner that seems statistically predictable does not mean that the lowest-level components of that system should be modeled as random little statistics engines. There are plenty of different kinds of (far simpler) systems that produce statistically predictable behavior at the high level without a corresponding reduction in the Kolmogorov complexity of the output as a whole.
The third insight is possibly my favorite, and Hofstadter had my favorite way of describing it: at sufficient scale, systems with rules do Strange things.
I think the third insight follows from the second, which follows from the first, and I think all three follow from nearly any of these books, and some others (e.g. Wolfram's). The universe is strange and wondrous. Our mysteries are still largely unsolved, our collective imagination is still largely untapped, and and we're on the brink of discoveries that will make the past sixty years of computation and theory seem like but a precursor.
My last point of note is this: the world needs fewer specialists, or possibly more specialists with less specialization. Each of these books describes broad insight that overlaps fields of study that are not generally overlapping (at least not as taught to me).
- Chaos: The Making of a New Science
- Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order
- I am a Strange Loop
- Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes
The overlap between the ideas in these books is extraordinary, and reading them all together yields some insight not to the actual structure of space-time, but rather to the myriad possibilities that we might not completely understand.
The first insight is one that plenty of other writers have already commented upon, but it bears repeating: both simplicity and complexity can (and do) result from very simple systems. In fact, many (most?) systems have aspects of both. E.g. Paired oscillators, cellular automata, Lorenz attractors, and (yes, yes) any system sufficiently powerful to allow self-reference (e.g. strange loops).
This notion is not entirely dissimilar from some points Wolfram made in his grand opus A New Kind of Science, though this was not the first place such insight was noted (not even Wolfram's own first time noting the behaviors).
The second insight might be obvious to some, but still bears stating: behavior of low-level components of a system are not predictive of the system's high-level function, and vice-versa. E.g. neurons do not explain thought, thought does not explain neurons.
I would like to draw the attention of particle physicists to this second insight. Just because a system behaves in a manner that seems statistically predictable does not mean that the lowest-level components of that system should be modeled as random little statistics engines. There are plenty of different kinds of (far simpler) systems that produce statistically predictable behavior at the high level without a corresponding reduction in the Kolmogorov complexity of the output as a whole.
The third insight is possibly my favorite, and Hofstadter had my favorite way of describing it: at sufficient scale, systems with rules do Strange things.
I think the third insight follows from the second, which follows from the first, and I think all three follow from nearly any of these books, and some others (e.g. Wolfram's). The universe is strange and wondrous. Our mysteries are still largely unsolved, our collective imagination is still largely untapped, and and we're on the brink of discoveries that will make the past sixty years of computation and theory seem like but a precursor.
My last point of note is this: the world needs fewer specialists, or possibly more specialists with less specialization. Each of these books describes broad insight that overlaps fields of study that are not generally overlapping (at least not as taught to me).
// posted by David @ 10:13 AM 
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