Abstract
“Much as I dislike the idea of ages, I think a good case can be made that science has now moved from an Age of Reductionism to an Age of Emergence, a time when the search for ultimate causes of things shifts from the behavior of parts to the behavior of the collective” (Laughlin 2005, p. 208). This quotation by Nobel laureate in physics, Robert B. Laughlin, in his recent book, A Different Universe, raises interesting scientific and philosophical issues. Bench chemists continue successfully to synthesize new compounds and report results through quantitative and structural analyses of constitutive elements. The whole continues to be understood by analysis of the parts. The relatively recent science of emergence comes with a different perspective: how to explain novel, irreducible, and unpredictable appearances in cosmic evolution? New wholes seem to be more that the sum of their parts. How do these wholes come to exist? Do classical concepts of matter satisfy the science of emergence? Descriptions of nature’s phenomena that challenge classical interpretations of the “Age of Reductionism” are presented to stimulate possible new scientific and philosophical concepts for an age of reductionism and emergence.
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Notes
Mereology was a medieval concept concerned with three fundamental questions namely, what items are wholes, what items are parts, and under what conditions is one item a part of another item.
Cf. Scerri (2007), especially pp. 188–203 for an excellent description of the history and development of the quantum theory of the atom.
The Bénard instability is a physical example of the instability of Matter in a stationary state that gives rise to spontaneous organization. When a shallow dish of water is heated from below, at first a uniform liquid appears as heat is propagated from below by conduction. At some value of the temperature gradient (the Bénard instability point) in the dish a characteristic structure appears in which millions of molecules move coherently to form convection flows of molecules which can take forms of hexagons, rectangles, etc. These cells have been photographed. Apparently the random uncoordinated thermal motion of the molecules has been replaced at least in part by the energy of coordinated macroscopic ordered motion. This coordinated motion disappears, however, as soon as heating is removed and molecules return to normal thermal motion. Irreversibility in some sense seems to be inscribed in all stages of Matter’s emergence.
Cf. de Waal (2005), especially pp. 1–39.
Up until the nineteenth century, what is called natural science today was called natural philosophy.
Cf. Sheets-Johnstone (1998) for an informative analysis of empirical data of the emergence of consciousness.
It is noteworthy that the modern study of chaos, and mathematical equations to model self-organizing systems were not developed until after Teilhard’s death.
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Salmon, J.F. Emergence in evolution. Found Chem 11, 21–32 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-008-9059-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-008-9059-0