Dimensions of Science

This is my science blog, and it is a good time to put out some ideas which can be explored more deeply in the future.


In Fire in the Mind, George Johnson explores the search for order as reflected in scientific and religious speculation. He compares and contrasts views of the scientific and spiritual communities, particularly in the area around Santa Fe, New Mexico.


The way we carve up the world determines how we perceive it. Physicists see quarks, electons, waves, fields, symmetries and fractals as part of the scaffolding on which our experienes are based. The more we try to contain reality within our perceptual structures however, the more it resists.


Like the scientists who labor in the New Mexico laboratories and look for clues about the existence of everything, so the Tewa labor and wonder. The Tewa "...have woven a tight web of concepts..." into a worldview as well.


We are all trying to make sense of a world which began in mystery and which is connected in ways we cannot yet grasp.


What the scientists in New Mexico and other places have found is that there are patterns which are common to simple and complex systems as well. This gives credence to the notion that there is an overall web of harmony in which all reality is embedded.

Since mathematics is the best tool we have for discerning these patterns, and since mathematics, even aided by advanced computer science, is very crude way of uncovering patterns of systems more complex than the atom, there has been uneven progress in the quest for an overall understanding of reality.

Can Schrodinger Waves be extended to apply to superatomic phenomena?

Can Heisenberg Matrices make the output of experiments on complex systems meaningful?

Can the universality buried in fractal structures explain social phenomena?

Is there a Dirac Sea from which social and economic phenomena emerge?

Certainly worthy questions at least.

In The Quark and the Jaguar, Nobel Prize winning scientist Murray Gell-Mann, gives us a glimpse of his ideas which build from subatomic structures like quarks to complex systems like jaguars.

Gell-Mann is the man who made sense of the "particle zoo" which had been vexing particle physicists in the mid twentieth century. He was also one of the founders of the complexity science movement in the 1980's.

Complexity science is a term which has come to be associated with a movement which brought together thinkers from all areas of thought to probe deep questions. In the process they found commonalities among what were thought to be distinct disciplines.

Economics had uncovered patterns which were also apparant in physics. Biology overlapped with chemistry and physics. Sociological patterns bore resemblance to physical patterns. Patterns of aesthetics often mirrored those of nature.

If we can build a metaphysics which can encompass all phenomena, not just physical phenomena, we will be on the path to a level of understanding which could lead to world harmony.

The tools are emerging.

We are ready to interpret their findings

Lee