The triumph of emergence
From a new book by Robert Laughlin:
�What physical science has to tell us is that the whole being more than the sum of its parts is not merely a concept, but a physical phenomenon,� he writes. �Nature is regulated not only by a microscopic rule base, but some powerful and general principles of organization�some of the principles are known but the vast majority are not. New ones are being discovered all the time�.If a simple physical phenomenon can become independent of the more fundamental laws from which it descends, so can we. I am carbon, but I need not have been. I have a meaning transcending the atoms from which I am made.�
— from A Different University: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down
Thanks to the Plexus Institute for the tip. Laughlin sounds like a neat guy. When he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998 he used the opportunity of his banquet speech to toast babies, as the best teachers of physics. He quipped:
Take, for example, the destruction operator. It costs thousands of dollars and many years of study to fully educate an undergraduate about this concept. But just let a baby loose in a living room in which your stereo is down low within easy reach and you will shortly understand with most wonderful clarity what a destruction operator is.
That’s my kind of Nobel Laureate.
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