As part of a TV documentary, Why are we here? produced by Ard Louis and David Malone there is a nice series of interviews where emergence is discussed by George Ellis, Peter Atkins, and Denis Noble.
I can't seem to embed the interviews here and so have put in links to short clips.
George Ellis discusses the difference between weak and strong emergence and his attitude to each.
In separate clips, Denis Noble discusses emergence and reductionism in biology.
Peter Atkins, a hardcore reductionist, IMHO does not seem to seriously engage with the issue.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
From Leo Szilard to the Tasmanian wilderness
Richard Flanagan is an esteemed Australian writer. My son recently gave our family a copy of Flanagan's recent book, Question 7 . It is...
-
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro... -
If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new mat...
-
I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
Is academic quintessence reductionist and academic managerialism an emergent phenomena ?
ReplyDeleteSomebody needs to ask Peter Atkins what the criteria for the size of an ensemble is to define temperature. If he starts blathering too much he'll defeat his argument. Fairly ironically I guess.
ReplyDeleteI can answer that question. It depends on the average energy.
DeleteBut to explain it completely requires great care. Since the real world is quantum, you simply cannot ignore the uncertainty principle.
Long ago I did actual experiments that showed that at a total energy of about 3/8 e.v. it requires only a few (<20) atoms to behave as a quantum microcanonical ensemble.
Emergence and Reductionism: an awkward Baconian alliance
ReplyDeletehttps://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.06884.pdf
Piers Coleman
Center for Materials Theory, Department of Physics and Astronomy,
This article discusses the relationship between emergence and reductionism from the perspective of a condensed matter physici