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Emergence is everywhere, and it’s a fundamental process that we see in this universe at every scale, from below atomic and molecular size to clusters of galaxies. Emergence is seen in the evolution of living forms, in landscape features, in the weather, the development of languages, cities, and engineering.
The properties of the universe itself (whatever they may have been) seem to have resulted in the emergence of four fields, each with its own properties.
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Fields underlie everything we’re familiar with in the universe in which we live. We know nothing about the universe at the time it began, though we know a surprising amount about the universe just a tiny fraction of a second after that beginning.
No, I’m not writing about a field with hedges around it, but a field as defined and understood by physicists. The first thing to exist in our universe was a field, quite possibly just a single field (or so I like to imagine). This is the second article on the topic of emergence, and you’ll see why later.
So let’s begin by thinking about the nature of a field. Physicists talk about several different fields – a gravitational field for example. In 1865 James Clerk Maxwell published ‘A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field’ in which he explained that magnetism, electricity and light are all functions of a field. Fields are not particles, or forces (though they can and do give rise to these). Instead, a field permeates all of space. Right now you are exposed to the gravitational field and you are being acted on by the sun, the moon and the earth (and everything else in the universe). The pull these objects exert on you are in proportion to your mass and the mass of the distant object (let’s say the Sun) and by the distance between you. The strongest pull and the only one you will be aware of is the pull of the Earth, you’ll certainly notice it if you trip and fall over, or if you drop something. The Moon is not as massive as the Earth and is far away, so has much less pull. The Sun is much more massive than the Earth, but it’s also far, far more distant, and therefore pulls on you much less than the Earth does. These rules apply to every object in the universe, there is gravitational attraction between you and your cat (if you have one) also there’s gravitational attraction between you and the Andromeda galaxy. These attractions are very tiny as neither you nor the cat have much mass, and the Andromeda galaxy is exceedingly far away.
All of this can be quantified and a mathematical formula exists so that, given the masses of two objects and the distance between them, it’s easy to calculate the strength of the attraction.
We don’t know how the universe began, or why, but we do know more or less when – almost 13.8 billion years ago. When the universe was still very new (if it makes sense to talk about time at all in the first picosecond (a billionth of a second), the still very tiny universe was filled by the gravitational field (as it still is today). This field became distinct from other fields repeatedly as the universe grew, giving rise to the electromagnetic field, then the weak field, and finally the strong field.
This represents the earliest event we might describe as emergence. The properties of the universe itself (whatever they may have been) seem to have resulted in the emergence of four fields, each with its own properties, four things that were not originally present. There’s probably little more to say about any of this, and the way I’ve portrayed it is speculative. But given these four fields, further steps of emergence can be discerned rather more clearly. And that’s something we’ll look at in another part of this series.
I hope 2023 will be a year to look forward to. As this year closes and the new one arrives, my hope, wish, and prayer for you is that grace and blessing will fill your life.
Wow, it’s that time of year again, somehow it feels like a few months since I last chose a photo to share for this occasion. This year’s image shows winter catkins covered by crystals of hoar frost. What can this photo say to us?
More and more, the UK is a rich mix of people from many cultural backgrounds. That’s why the title is not ‘Christmas Greetings’. Please accept the greetings and replace the word ‘Season’ with whatever you like. If you’re Hindu you could choose ‘Divali’ as a reminder of your celebrations in October, or Jewish friends might go with ‘Hannukah’ in December. If you’re Muslim there’s no particular celebration for winter 2022; perhaps you could take my greetings as a blessing for the whole of next year – spring, summer, autumn and winter again. Buddhists have two festivals in January. And there are more groups of people I haven’t mentioned specifically. An exhaustive list would be – exhausting!
But whoever you are and whatever you celebrate, I want to bless you with a few words and with the picture of hoar frost. What can that picture say to us?
It should remind us that life is full of seasons, and wintertime in the UK can be cold, especially January and February. This year will be especially hard for some because of rising prices, rarely matched by rising incomes. Heating this winter will be costly and there will be too many who simply won’t be able to keep their home cosy. And then there are those with no home at all.
And what about Ukraine and other war-torn places? In Ukraine the winters can be harsh with the coldest days often reaching -5°C, and sometimes -10°C or -20°C. Now imagine (if you can) living at those temperatures in an unheated house with broken windows, no electrical power, no internet, and no water supply. Although national and local government and company teams reconnect all these services as quickly and widely as possible, repairs are often taken down again by the next Russian air strike.
So my message this winter is that we should all help those around us. Talk with lonely people, provide some dried or canned food to your local food bank, donate warm clothes you no longer need, perhaps to a charity shop. If you can afford a gift of money, choose a charity that will use your donation wisely and effectively.
The picture also reminds us that even cold weather can be beautiful. Those frost crystals look like jewellery! And as the days start to lengthen again, the temperature will rise, plants will start to bud and flower, birds will build their nests, and the promise of summer weather will be just around the corner. Of course, for those of you in the southern hemisphere all this will be back-to-front. For you, spring is already turning into summer and you can look forward to autumn colours in March and April. For all of us, now will become yesterday, a week ago, a month ago; and tomorrow will become today.
So whoever you are, whatever faith you have (or none), I hope 2023 will be a year to look forward to. As this year closes and the new one arrives, my hope, wish, and prayer for you is that grace and blessing will fill your life in ways hoped for and ways unexpected.
Let’s all be grateful for what we have, and display compassion and love towards those who don’t. In that way, blessing will have a chance to touch you, and through you, touch others as well.
Emergence is everywhere, and you would not be here without it! … Emergence matters because it is one of the fundamental processes that we see in this universe at every imaginable scale.
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One of my many interests is the way in which everything we’re familiar with in the universe developed out of a previous state, and how new features make further developments possible – over and over and over again.
I’d like to explain how this seems to be an underlying property of our universe. We are surrounded by astonishing levels of complexity and the earlier stages seem to be far simpler than later ones; at the beginning of the process (if there is a clear beginning) everything was simple. So how can the complex arise from the simple?
In its entirety this story will take us from the big bang, through particles and atoms, to chemistry, onwards to life, intelligence, and beyond. This is far, far too much for a single blog post, so I will choose topics one by one and write about them. I’m not planning to start at the beginning, and the posts won’t be in the order that events took place, but as I write additional articles, I plan to link them into a logical series.
I should explain something about my background and training – I’m not an expert on all of the topics we will be covering, perhaps not really an expert in any of them! I retired in 2010, but the first part of my career was in biology, specifically flower and fruit development in plums, so I do have a science background. My first degree was from Bath University in the UK, an honours degree in Horticulture; then during my research career I wrote an MSc thesis at Bristol University on the plum reproduction work; and later I completed an ordinary degree in mathematics and computing at the Open University as it seemed useful to have a background in methods that were becoming rather more frequently used by biologists. In the mid 90s my research career abruptly ended through unexpected personal circumstances.
But let’s go back to some thoughts on the complex arising from the simple. This is really quite counterintuitive for most people and, as it forms the basis for the story I want to tell, it’s important to think about it clearly at the start. At its heart, emergence is very simple. So simple we often take it for granted.
A few examples will help.
Where do cities come from? Obviously they’re built by people. Building towns and cities is something that people do, they provide places to live, places to work, shops, schools, hospitals, transport (ranging from footpaths to airports) and much more. Our societies could not exist without cities.
If we could take a few hundred people to a large, uninhabited island, what would they do? They would look for sources of food and water. They’d try to start a fire to keep warm. They’d explore the area. And they’d build shelters of some kind. Given time they might build a village.
Without people there would be no towns. But given a population, villages, towns and cities will eventually begin to appear. One person cannot build a village, let alone a city; it requires cooperation and a lot of resources.
It’s fair to say that cities emerge when large groups of people cooperate. A city and the life of a city are emergent properties of a cooperating group of people.
A murmuration is a flock of birds behaving in a particular way. I wrote about this some time ago in a different context. But take a look, especially at the video link in the article; it’s an amazing and beautiful thing to watch. Without the starlings there could be no murmuration. It’s another example of emergence. Murmuration becomes possible (though not inevitable) when there’s a large group of birds flying together.
For our final example, lets think about the internet. Something like the internet was bound to arise once computers became plentiful. It was useful to connect computers together so that all the computers in an office could share a single printer or some other resource. And then it became useful to connect up individual offices and companies for email, or file sharing. The details of the protocols that make it all possible don’t matter, it could have been done in a variety of ways; but the principle of world spanning connectivity was bound to develop, one way or another.
Emergent behaviour is usually unpredictable. If you studied a single starling, or even a cage containing ten birds, you might learn a great deal about starlings, but nothing you learned would prepare you for the sight of a murmuration. Nor would it enable you to predict murmurations.
Emergence matters because it is one of the fundamental processes that we see in this universe at every imaginable scale. We see it in the behaviour of the wave functions that underlie elementary particles, and we see it in the formation of galaxies and even clusters of galaxies. We see it in everyday life (think about those cities mentioned above), we see it in the way collections of neurons give rise to complex behaviours in our brains, we see it in political life, in business, and in economics. Emergence is everywhere, and you would not be here without it!
I’ll be writing on this topic again, but next time I’ll choose a particular example of emergence. This article acts as an introduction to the topic and will probably be accompanied by an index for this and other articles in the series. Along the way I’ll try to explain emergence in a bit more detail, and to provide links to material out there on the internet that will go far deeper than I plan to (or even could) take you, my readers.
< No earlier posts | Index | In the beginning – a field >
Unexpected results are always disappointing and sometimes very harmful
Let’s talk about truth.
Truth is like the stars in the sky above, sometimes cloudy skies hide the stars from view, but we know they’re still there. And when the clouds move away we see them clearly again, they remain the same, the constellations are still recognisable. It’s possible to navigate by the stars, they are dependable and reliable.
Truth is reliable too; when we navigate according to the truth our decisions and choices will produce the expected results. If we are fed untruth, our choices will produce unexpected results. And unexpected results are always disappointing and sometimes very harmful – to us and to others.
In this world we are surrounded by a great deal of untruth. It puzzles me that so many people assume that misinformation will result in good choices. We see it everywhere – in politics, in business, in warfare, in daily life. Let’s look at a few examples:
Do you see a pattern here? You may disagree with me strongly on any or all of my assertions above, but the plain fact remains that if you fail to see the truth about something, deliberately or not, and you base your actions on the flimsy foundations of error, lies, or misinformation (your own or from others), you will fail. Sooner or later bad choices will result in bad outcomes. They always do.
Claiming something to be true when it’s false will never, in the long term, work in your favour or in mine.
Truth matters. Let’s value it, search it out, base our choices on it, and benefit from the best outcomes available to us.
Journeys of Heart and Mind 