OFF: SETI, ETs

[Paul Mather]

On Thu, 11 Jul 1996, M Holmes wrote:

> I was recently at a lecture here by one of the local theoretical physics
> gurus. He was talking about how a Grand Universal Theory (including all
> four Forces) is highly likely within ten or twenty years (current
> accelerators are close to the energy required to have a good look at the
> symmetry breakdown point of gravity or somesuch). Before the lecture I'd
> always wondered how particles like the neutrino et al could have no
> mass. After the lecture I realised that the real question is why some
> particles do have mass. It's a pretty weird property.

A very interesting book I read a couple of months ago concerned itself
with "the reductionist nightmare."  One of its conclusions is that a
"theory of everything" (the physicists Holy Grail) is pretty useless in
terms of understanding because you couldn't use it to predict any
phenomena beyond the very minute scale upon which it focuses.  Worse
still, its "language" is not that which would provide a coherent
explanation of large-scale phenomena in terms we understand in the domain
of the phenomena.  (Try and map the interactions of massive numbers of
elementary particles comprising a cat and a bowl of food to the concept
"the cat is eating because it is hungry"---not that you could simulate
such a huge conglomeration of particles, anyway.)

One of the main thrusts of the book is that it is very easy to produce
complexity, and that the real question is why does there exist any
simplicity at all?  They derive two notions: simplexity and complicity,
and stress the important role that *context* and interaction play in the
universe---something often ignored in the reductionist approach.

The book is called _The Collapse of Chaos_, by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart
(Penguin, 1994).  Cohen is a reproductive biologist and Stewart a
mathematician (and author of _Does God Play Dice?_).  The first half is a
kind of primer about what is known and orthodox about many fields, and the
latter half is the authors' spin on things, in which they turn quite a bit
of the first half on its head (e.g. they argue that Dawkins' "selfish
gene" should actually be termed the "slavish gene").  There is lots of
interesting stuff about biology and evolution, and the important role
that context plays in both.  There is also an annotated bibliography.  The
book is nicely written, and not turgid.  I found it highly interesting and
informative.  I recommend you try and chase down a copy in your local
library.

> I'm having a lot of difficulty not seeing the Universe as some kind of
> finite automata simulation lately.

Or cellular automata...

Cheers,

Paul.

obCD: The Bevis Frond, _New River Head_

e-mail: paul at csgrad.cs.vt.edu                    A stranger in a strange land.