Andrew Fildes wrote:
> Ah, is Dark Matter the new Phlogisten? - can't see it, can't weigh it but it
> must exist or our entire paradigm is out of the window...
>
Perhaps not a bad analogy, although they have "weighed" it in total, as
a certain mas is needed to make the equations work.
All this has reminded me of another, possibly much larger paradigm in
trouble. Although what we now call Reductionism and Emergence have been
around since the Greeks, reductionism has been at the base of "hard"
science since at least Decartes.
The philosophical underpinning for the expenditure on research into
subatomic particles, although not always stated, is the idea that, once
the fundamental particles are discovered and the rules of their behavior
and interactions are defined, all higher level physical phenomena, up
to, in the view of some, disease and even human behavior may be derived.
The main point of the book I just quoted, Robert Laughlin's "A Different
Universe", is that this is most likely not true.
As someone who won his share of a Nobel for solving the quantum field
equations needed for the work so honored, he is about as good an
authority as one may find. In the book, he spends a lot of time
discussing quantum mechanics, in a relatively layman friendly way, and
the known behaviors of larger groups of atoms. He says that it is
generally not possible to solve the field equations for more than small
numbers of atoms. Then he gives lots of examples of how larger numbers
of atoms behave in very highly predictable ways so consistently that the
physical constants found to apply to math describing these behaviors may
be determined to accuracies of a few parts per million.
He points out that this kind of behavior is quite different that the
probabilistic behavior of quantum mechanical systems. His conclusion,
fairly far into the book, is "Reductionism is dead". He concludes that
the behavior of larger numbers of atoms, that is, starting still much
smaller than we can see, is true emergent behavior, entirely independent
of the physics of the constituent parts in lower numbers.
I won't try to make his arguments, as it's beyond my capabilities and/or
interest to rehash the book. It is relatively [snicker] easy reading for
the layman interested in science.
If he turns out to be "right", the implications for science are huge. If
matter at a certain scale simply behaves the way it does because that's
the way it behaves, not because of some underlying, quantifiable causes,
who is to say that it may not behave yet again differently at other
scales - or under other circumstances?
Much of our theoretical understanding of the nature of the larger
universe is based on the idea that the collective behavior of groupings
of matter very much larger than any we can directly test are the same as
that which is directly accessible to us.
For social systems that echo the scientific model of reductionism, the
implications may be even greater. A great deal of social, philosophical,
religious and psychological thought beginning most recently in the
Enlightenment has a good dose of reductionism in it.
Is logic itself even always valid in a universe where things may be and
behave in certain ways "just because"?
Sleep well tonight.
Moose
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