Chapter 13 "What am I doing here?"

"What am I doing here?" Putting these discussions together was a tricky job indeed.In fact, raising funds is not very difficult.Gell-Mann used his connections to pull in $25,000 from the Carnegie Foundation. IBM donated $10,000.Cowan raised an additional $25,000 from the MacArthur Foundation. (Gelmann, who is on the foundation’s board, didn’t feel comfortable raising money himself.) But the more difficult thing is who to invite to participate."The question is, can you get the people you invite to talk to each other, to inspire each other, to inspire each other on issues that are happening on the fringes of the discipline? Can we form a community that can really enrich this type of research in the great integration of science?" Cowan said. ?” It’s not hard to imagine that such a meeting would end up in a situation where everyone’s topic just passed by everyone else’s topic-if some of them didn’t start because they were bored. A word that walks out of the conference room.The only way to prevent this from happening is to invite the right people to the discussion.

“We don’t need the type of person who is in isolation, the type who shuts himself in an office and writes a book,” Cowan said. "We need communication, we need passion, and we need mutual motivation to generate knowledge." What they need most, he says, are people who have already shown real talent and creativity in their subject area, but who are open-minded and open to new ideas.Frustratingly, such people are rare, even (or especially) among world-renowned scientists.Gell-Mann recommends some people who might have such qualities."Gel-Mann has great taste for the intellectual prowess of people. And he knows everybody," says Cowan. Herb Anderson also recommends a few, as do Paines and Phil Anderson ."Phil's common sense is uncanny," Cowan says. "He's very rude to people he thinks are flashy." It took them a summer of phone calls and brainstorming across the country to find the best of the best in every discipline. Will.In the end, they found that they had come up with “an astonishing list of brilliant minds,” including eminent physicists, anthropologists, and clinical psychologists.

Of course, neither Cowen nor anyone knew what would happen when these people got together. In fact, it is simply impossible to gather all these people together.Their respective scheduling conflicts forced Paines to schedule the seminars over two separate weekends, October 6-7 and November 10-11, 1984.But Cowan remembers that even such a two-session session had trouble holding it.The Oct. 6 symposium began with a forty-five-minute presentation by Gell-Mann entitled: "The Concept of the Institute"—essentially his presentation to senior fellows the previous Christmas. An expanded version of the inspiring talk we gave on The Great Integration of Science in the Making.What followed was a lengthy discussion on how to turn this concept into a practical scientific research program and a realistic research institute. "There was some contention in the discussion," Cowan said.At first, everyone was not very clear about how to find a common ground.

For example, University of Chicago neuroscientist Jack Cowan (no relation to George Cowan) argues that molecular biologists and neuroscientists are long overdue to start paying more attention to theoretical research, Find meaning in the wealth of data already at your fingertips on individual cells and individual molecules.But there is an immediate objection that cells and biomolecules are largely the product of random evolution and have little significance for theoretical research.But Jack Cowan, who has heard similar objections before, stands his ground, citing the visual hallucinations induced by narcotics as an example.These optical illusions can have a variety of shapes such as lattices, spirals, and funnels.Each shape can be seen as a linear electrical wave passing through the brain's visual cortex.Is it possible to use the mathematical field theories used by physicists to make a linear electric wave pattern?

Archeology is the field most ripe for interdisciplinary research, says Douglas Schwartz of the American Institute.The American Institute is housed in the Archaeological Center in Santa Fe, where the symposium took place.Archaeological research is confronting three fundamental mysteries, says Douglas: First, when did primates that did not evolve into humans acquire human traits, including complex language and culture?This happened a million years ago, from the time man was able to walk upright?Or did it happen tens of thousands of years ago, when Neanderthals started to transform into modern humans, Homo erectus?What caused these changes?Millions of species survive without brains the size of our own.Why are species on earth so different?Second, why did agricultural societies and sedentary life replace nomadic hunting and tribal life?Third, what forces have led to the development of cultural complexities such as the division of labor, the formation of elites, and the formation of power structures based on factors such as economics and religion?

While the archaeological remains of the rise and fall of the Anasazi civilization in the southern United States provide excellent field laboratories for the latter two mysteries, these three have yet to find real answers, Swartz said.The only hope of finding answers, he felt, lay in more collaboration than ever before between archaeologists and experts from other disciplines.Field researchers need more help from physicists, chemists, geographers and paleoanthropologists to enable them to reconstruct changes in climate and ecological balance in ancient times.More importantly, they need historians, economists, sociologists and anthropologists to help them understand what exactly drove the actions of ancient people.

That statement certainly struck a chord with University of Chicago archaeologist Robert McCormack Adams.Adams was sworn in as secretary general of the Smithsonian Institute for Biological Studies a few weeks ago.For at least the past decade, he says, he has grown increasingly impatient with anthropologists' incrementalism.When he was digging in Mesopotamia, he saw ancient cultures go through chaotic shocks and turmoil.He says he increasingly sees the rise and fall of civilizations as self-organizing phenomena.In this process, at different times, human beings choose different cultural groups based on their different understandings of the environment.

Stephen Wolfram also takes the topic of self-organization from a completely different direction.Twenty-five-year-old Stephen of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University is a prodigy from England.He is studying complex phenomena at the most fundamental level.He had long been in talks with the University of Illinois to create a center for complex systems research.He said that whenever you look at systems that are very complex in physics or biology, their basic building blocks and fundamental laws are very simple.Complexity arises because these simple components interact automatically.Complexity is in organization: the components of a system interact in an infinite number of possible ways.

More recently, Wolfram and many other theorists have begun to use cellular automata for the study of complexity.This basically generates various forms on a computer screen according to a special program that has been programmed.Cell generators have the advantage of being precisely defined and thus can be used for detailed analysis.Moreover, they are perfectly suited to the study of forms of astonishing dynamics and complexity arising from very simple laws.The challenge for theorists, he says, is to derive from this a general law that should describe when and how such complexity emerges in nature.While there are no answers yet, he is optimistic.

Also, no matter what you do with the research, make sure that every researcher has the best current computer equipment.Computers are the most fundamental tool for doing complexity research, he added. The discussion went on like this.How should the institute be organized?Robert Wilson, the founding director of the Formie National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago, said it was critical that the institute maintain close ties with experimenters.Too much theory ends up keeping your eyes glued to your belly button. IBM's chief scientist, Louis Branscomb, is a big proponent of the idea of ​​an institute without departmental boundaries.In such a research environment, people can talk freely and influence each other. "It's really important that people can steal ideas from each other," he said.

By lunchtime on the first day, Cowan said, the attendees became enthusiastic about their tasks.Fortunately, Santa Fe coincided with the fine autumn weather. After everyone lined up to choose their own lunch, they went out with their plates and continued the discussion and debate just now on the grass of the American Institute. (The institute's property once belonged to the eccentric heir who buried two hundred and twenty dogs here.) "People are starting to realize that something is forming. They're welcoming it," says Cowan. ’” By the next day, which was a Sunday, “things had gotten really exciting.” By Monday morning, when the attendees were heading home, it was clear to everyone that there could indeed be a scientific core. . Carruthers felt like he was in heaven this weekend. "It's a group of people from different disciplines who are some of the most creative people in the world. They have a lot in common with each other and basically share a consensus about the world. They all seem to feel the 'emerging integration' ’ really meant a reorganization of science—the recurring themes of science in different fields would be regrouped in new ways. I remember my conversation with Stanford population biologists Jack Cowan, Mare Feldman , and many discussions among mathematicians. Our respective disciplines and cultural backgrounds are very different, but we find that the problems we face are very repetitive, both technically and structurally. Perhaps this is partly because human My mind can only think a certain way, but these seminars turned all of us into true believers. I would hate to call it a religious experience, but it's pretty close to it." For Ed Knapp, it's a joy to be among so many famous and famous people.Knapp is the patriarch of Los Alamos and is currently serving as the current chairman of the National Science Foundation in Washington.He also took part in some of the initial discussions about creating the Institute.Once he walked up to Carruthers and asked, "Hey, what am I doing here?" Bob Adams of the Smithsonian had a similar reaction. "This is a very good batch of papers." He said. "When things are coming out, and you've started doing the work of looking for clues, to be able to come out to a Santa Fe conference like this and suddenly find that there's a lot of work going on in neurobiology, cosmology, ecological balance theory, and so on. Exploration of aspects—god, you only wish you could join in." A second seminar was held a month later, with all the different attendees, but the effect was just as good as the previous one.Even Anderson was deeply touched. "You can't help but feel the itch," he said.The seminar dispelled his last skepticism: the Institute was indeed different from all the advanced research institutions he had ever known. “This institute is more committed to interdisciplinary research than any research institution of its kind before. They really focus on common problems between disciplines,” he said.And, the discussion did produce something. "While it is not yet clear whether all aspects of the discussion will be included in the research plan, we do know that many of them will be included in the research plan." More importantly, the symposium clarified Cowan's concept of the grand integration of science, which is much needed."We found a lot of similarities," Gell-Mann recalls. "There were a lot of commonalities in the problems we were dealing with in the various disciplines. You have to look and scrutinize, but once you get the idea of ​​each Disciplinary jargon, and suddenly you see that there is so much in common with the problems everyone is facing.” In particular, the founding workshops demonstrated that, at the heart of every problem, a system of numerous "actors" is involved.These actors may be molecules, neurons, species, consumers, or even corporations.But whatever these actors are, they are things that constantly self-organize and re-organize themselves into larger structures by adapting and competing with each other.In this way, molecules assemble into cells, neurons into brains, species into ecological balance systems, consumers and businesses into economies, and so on.At each stage, newly formed structures form and generate new emergent behavioral manifestations.In other words, complexity is essentially a science of emergence.The challenge we face, which is what Cowan has been trying to make clear, is how to discover the fundamental laws of emergence. It's not a coincidence that the discussion has reached this stage where this new integrated science has a name: complexity science."It seems to be a better umbrella term for everything we're working on than other names we've stuck with, including 'mutation science,'" Cowan said. "It covers everything I'm interested in, and maybe Covers everything that is of interest to everyone in the Institute." So, after two seminars, Cowin and his institute hit the road.What they need most now is someone who can generously donate to them and subsidize them.