May 10 2005
Laughlin’s “A Different Universe”
I’ve been reading Robert Laughlin’s: A Different Universe, Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down.
I am aware that Nobel laureates can use their prize as a trigger to drift off into less rigorous thinking, and perhaps Laughlin perches himself on a razor’s edge in this book. I have only an (ancient) undergraduate background in physics, so I am not in a position to asses all of his claims. But they do resonate with my thinking in many ways.
His basic theme is that we are transitioning from the Age of Reductionism to the Age of Emergence, that the laws of nature are themselves emergent properties. The organization of nature creates the laws, not the other way around:
p. 7: The only way we know that the behavior of cats is not fundamental, for example, is because cats fail to work when pushed beyond their proper operating limits, so to speak. Similarly, the only way we know atoms are not fundamental [components of nature] is that they come apart when caused to collide at great speed.
[ This correlates to my general rants about "fixing what's broken" is an entirely different model of uplift from "amplifying what positive and life-affirming" ]
