{"id":726,"date":"2005-05-10T10:32:00","date_gmt":"2005-05-10T18:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscorrigan.com\/blogs\/?p=726"},"modified":"2005-05-10T10:32:00","modified_gmt":"2005-05-10T18:32:00","slug":"the-triumph-of-emergence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/the-triumph-of-emergence\/","title":{"rendered":"The triumph of emergence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From a new book by Robert Laughlin:<\/p>\n<div>\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdWhat 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,\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd he writes.  \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdNature is regulated not only by a microscopic rule base, but some powerful and general principles of organization\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdsome of the principles are known but the vast majority are not. New ones are being discovered all the time\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd.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.\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; from A Different University: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Thanks to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.plexusinstitute.com\/\">Plexus Institute<\/a> for the tip.  Laughlin sounds like a neat guy.  When he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998 he used the opportunity of <a href=\"http:\/\/nobelprize.org\/physics\/laureates\/1998\/laughlin-speech.html\">his banquet speech<\/a> to toast babies, as the best teachers of physics.  He quipped:<\/p>\n<div>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.<\/div>\n<p>That&#8217;s my kind of Nobel Laureate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From a new book by Robert Laughlin: \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdWhat 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,\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd he writes. \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdNature is regulated not only by a microscopic rule base, but some powerful and general principles of organization\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdsome of the principles are known but the vast majority are not. New ones are being discovered all the time\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd.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 &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piBp1-bI","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}