Chapter 12 phil

phil On June 29, 1984, Philip Anderson received a note from Paines asking if he would like to participate in a symposium on the "Great Integration of Science in the Making" this fall. Well, maybe.Anderson has some doubts.He had already heard rumors about the Institute.Gell-Mann talked about the institute everywhere he went.As far as Anderson knew, the institute was a relaxed retirement home for several aging Nobel laureates from Caltech, with a million-dollar endowment and a gathering of the biggest names in science. Thankfully, Anderson's popularity is not below Mari Gell-Mann's.He received the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his outstanding contributions to condensed matter physics.For thirty years he has enjoyed as much centrality in his field as Gell-Mann has in his.But in private, Anderson flouted authority and honor.He didn't even like working on fashionable problems.Whenever he felt that other theoretical physicists were flocking to a subject he was working on, he instinctively turned elsewhere.

He especially couldn't bear the practice of those rising stars in the physics world showing off their expertise everywhere, as if they were wearing academic badges, regardless of their academic achievements, they would shout loudly: "Look at me, I am a particle Physicists!", "Look at me, I'm a cosmologist!" Congress squandered money on flashy new telescopes and expensive new accelerators, and let some small-scale, as seen in Anderson Anderson was outraged that more scientifically valuable research projects were going without money.He has spent much of his time before congressional committees denouncing particle physicists' recently announced plans for the multibillion-dollar Super-conducting Supercollider.

Besides, he thought the Santa Fe gang looked like a bunch of amateurs.How did Mari Gell-Mann know how to organize an interdisciplinary institute?He has never done research for any interdisciplinary project in his life.Paines has done at least some work with astronomers that applies solid-state physics to the structure of neutron stars.He and Anderson were indeed working on this little problem together.But what about everyone else?Anderson spent most of his academic career at Bell Labs.If there ever was an interdisciplinary environment, Bell Labs was one.Anderson knows how tricky it is to conduct such interdisciplinary research.In the academic field, the corpses of all kinds of novelty institutes that have suffered disastrous failures are scattered everywhere.These novelty institutes end up either being occupied by madmen, or falling into a situation where high IQs are suffocated.In fact, there is a tragic example of Anderson all around Princeton: the stately Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, home of Oppenheimer, Einstein and von Neumann.The Institute has indeed achieved remarkable success in some areas, such as mathematics.But as an interdisciplinary institute, Anderson sees it as a tragic failure.Here, there is nothing more than a group of extremely smart scientists who are busy with their own affairs and rarely discuss issues with each other. Anderson has seen many outstanding scientists go in and never fulfill their promises.

But despite this, Anderson still felt that the Santa Fe Institute was very attractive to him.Especially in turning the tide of reductionism.This is his language, and he has waged a guerrilla war against reductionism for decades. The first thing that spurred him into action, he recalls, was reading an article in 1965 by the particle physicist Victor Weisskopf.In this talk, Weisskopf seemed to be implying that "fundamental" science—that is, part of particle physics and cosmology—was different from, and superior to, applied disciplines such as condensed matter physics.As a condensed matter physicist, Anderson felt insulted and exasperated.He immediately wrote an article opposing the idea, published in Science Magazine in 1972.The title of this article is "More Is Different".Since then, Anderson has promoted his views at every opportunity.

He said that he first had to admit that the form of reductionism has its "philosophical correctness."That is: the belief that the universe is governed by natural laws.The vast majority of scientists wholeheartedly agree with this assertion.Indeed, it is hard to imagine science without scientists accepting this view.To believe in the laws of nature is to believe that the universe can eventually be fully understood.The power that can determine the fate of the galaxy is also the power that can determine the apple that falls from the tree to the ground on the earth; the atom that can refract light through diamonds is the atom that can form a living cell; Neutrons and protons can also form the human brain, mind and soul.To believe in the laws of nature is to believe in the unity of nature at the deepest level.

But believing in the laws of nature doesn't mean that fundamental laws and elementary particles are the only things worth studying.That is, the idea that as long as you have a sufficiently large computer, everything else is predictable.Many scientists do think so, he says. In 1932, the physicists who discovered the positron (the antimatter representation of the electron) declared that "everything else is chemistry".More recently, Mari Gell-Mann himself has dismissed the theory of condensed matter physics as "dirty state physics".It was his arrogance that made Anderson intolerable.As he wrote in his 1972 article: "The ability to reduce everything to the simplest fundamental laws does not imply the ability to reconstruct the universe from these simplest fundamental laws. In fact , the more elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of fundamental laws, the more irrelevant these laws are to the real problems of other sciences, and the more remote they become from social reality."

This "everything else is chemistry" nonsense breaks down when it comes to the twin problems of massive scale and complexity.Take water, for example. The molecules that make up water are not complicated at all, just a big oxygen atom and two small hydrogen atoms stuck together, just like Mickey Mouse and his two ears.The behavior of water molecules is governed by well-known equations of atomic physics.But when you put a large number of water molecules in a hot pot, the water will suddenly boil, the water molecules will roll up and down, splash, and a large number of water molecules will form a collective characteristic, a liquid state.Each individual water molecule does not have such characteristics.In fact, unless you know exactly where to start and how to study these features, the answers cannot be found in the well-known equations of atomic physics.There is not even a hint of such a collective character in these equations.The liquid state of water is "emergence".

Likewise, emergent traits often lead to emergent manifestations, Anderson said.Cool the liquid water a little bit, for example, to 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and suddenly the water doesn't roll around in random balls anymore.Instead, the water molecules go into a "phase transition" and freeze themselves into a crystalline arrangement of what we call ice.Or you can do this experiment in reverse.When water is continuously heated, the boiling water molecules will suddenly evaporate, enter a phase transition, and become water vapor.Neither of these phase transitions makes any sense for a single water molecule.

Such examples emerge in endlessly.Weather is an emergent feature: Bring water vapor over the Gulf of Mexico, let it interact with sunlight and wind, and it can self-organize into an emergent structure called a thunderstorm.Life is also an emergent feature, the result of DNA molecules, protein molecules, and countless other molecules obeying the laws of chemistry.Mind is yet another emergent feature, the result of billions of neurons obeying the biological laws of living cells.In fact, as Anderson pointed out in his 1972 article, you can imagine the universe as being made up of different classes: "At each level of complexity entirely new features emerge. Each stage requires Entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations require as much inspiration and creativity as the previous stage. Psychology is not applied biology, and biology is not applied chemistry."

Anyone who has read his 1972 article or talked to its author will not doubt the author's emotional orientation.For Anderson, emergent phenomena amidst infinite change are the most alluring aspects of science.Quarks are pretty boring by comparison.That's the most important reason why he got into condensed matter physics: it's a wonderland of emergent phenomena. (He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his theoretical explanation of the delicate process by which a certain metal transforms from an electrical conductor to an insulator.) That's why condensed matter physics never quite satisfied him. In June 1984, when Anderson received an invitation from Paines, he was busy applying the techniques he had developed in physics to understand the three-dimensional structure of protein molecules and at the same time analyze the behavior of the nervous system: a series of simple processing How a machine performs computation like a network of neurons in the brain.He even got down to the ultimate mystery: He proposed a model to explain how the first life on Earth arose through the collective self-organization of simple chemical mixtures.

So, Anderson figured, if the Santa Fe Institute was serious, he'd love to hear about it.Of course, if it's serious. A few weeks later, he received an invitation from Paines to see it for himself.As it turned out, that summer he became president of the Aspen Center for Physics.The Physics Center is across the lawn from the Aspen Research Institute and is a summer retreat for theoretical physicists.Anderson had planned to meet Paines there to discuss some calculations about the internal structure of neutron stars.So when he went to Paines' office to meet him for the first time, he asked straight to the point: "Well, is your institute just playing tricks, or are you serious?" He knew that Paines would definitely Said: "Of course it is serious." But he wanted to hear how serious it was. Paines tried to make his answer convincing.He badly needs to bring Anderson in.For all his skepticism, Anderson is at least on a par with Gell-Mann in terms of breadth of interests and depth of insight.He would be a much-needed counterweight to Gell-Mann at the Institute.Moreover, his joining as a Nobel Prize winner will greatly enhance the credibility of the Institute. So Paines assured Anderson that the institute really wanted to do research across disciplines, not just a few trendy research topics.No, the institute would not be Mari Gell-Mann's personal front, nor would it be an adjunct to Los Alamos.Paines knew that Anderson wanted nothing to do with Los Alamos.Cowan was playing the leading role, Paines told Anderson, and so was Paines.If Anderson can join, he Paines will let him play a major role.Does Anderson have any speakers he can recommend to the symposium? Paines succeeded.Anderson knew he was hooked when he found himself calling out names and discussing topics.The opportunity to make his own thoughts work was too tempting for him. "The idea that I could have some impact at the institute led me to accept Paines' offer. If the institute does come to fruition, I am very eager to do my part in its development, hoping it will save us from the errors, to be able to develop as smoothly as possible.” Since Gell-Mann and Carruthers happened to be in Aspen, discussions about holding a symposium and setting up an institute continued throughout the summer.As soon as Anderson returned to Princeton in late summer, he wrote three or four pages of advice on how to organize the institute so that it would avoid mistakes. (The most important point is: don’t separate departments!) He was due to go to Santa Fe in the fall.