Replying to LO27967 --
Dear Organlearners,
Don Dwiggins <dond@advancedmp.com>
>In addition to putting time and complexity on parallel
>vertical axes, you also (implicitly) put quantities and
>qualities on parallel horizontal axes.
Greetings dear Dwig,
Perhaps I should tell what helped me to get the idea. I was also doing
research on Rene Descarte. He was one of the main architects of
reductionistc and analytical thinking. What I never knew (it was never
told to me in 17 years of training) was that Descarte was also the
inventor of the rectlinear X.Y graphs. This made me think, will I not
recapture something of Goethe's holistic thinking by making use of
parallel axes. The rest you have seen.
>Suppose we did a different diagram, with quantities and >qualities shown
as two curves plotted against time, and >with bifurcations marked as
milestones; what would it show?
Your question reminds of similar graphs (not exactly the same) which I
have shared with Chris Kloppes living close by and then later by email
with Leo Minnigh who lives in the Netherlands. It seems as if learning
minds are indeed beginning to wander into new possibilities. I will email
them in private to you because they might seem to be too nebulous for an
open dialogue.
>Back to the time-complexity parallelism: this seems
>to imply that the complexity of the universe is
>increasing over time, along with the total entropy
>(which makes sense if the associator between them
>is entropy production, and also seems to match
>what I've read of the emerging picture of the history
>of the universe). I wonder how this would strike most
>physicists?
I, for one, got a wonderful insight in the evolution of the thinking of
Lord Kelvin. I have reported elsewhere in "Lord Kelvin LO27964" on it.
This great man would have loved to live another hundred years so as to
participate in this dialogue.
After Charles Darwin formulated his theory of biological evolution, the
general public became soon aware of evolution. Many denied the facts of
evolution and few tried to propose a different theory. But Lord Kelvin
himself began to see evolution in a much grander sense like stellar
evolution and geological evolution. He suspected that the 2nd law of
thermodynamics (which I prefer to call LEP -- Law of Entropy Production)
had very much to do with it.
He was particularly interested in the jump from one order to another like
the geological to the biological or the plant to the animal. In other
words, he was perhaps the first who had a feeling for what we will today
call an ordinate bifurcation.
But in his days thermodynamics was still in its infant stage and few
actual thermodynamical data were available. (It is time consuming to
measure and calculate such data.) So he lacked enough information to make
such a bold claim as Ilya Prigogine another 70 years later that the 2nd
law is indeed driving all kinds of physical evolution.
Meanwhile, with Lord Kelvin at old age, Jan Smuts as a young student in
Cambridge made his first extensive study of a completely different kind of
evolution, namely the evolution of personality. He based his study on the
works of Walt Whitman. In that study he shows clearly his won tacit
knowledge of wholeness and his own difficulties in trying to articulate
this. But almost 30 years later with his Holism and Evolution (1926) he
showed just what a master he had become in articulating what he knows.
It is a pity that Jan Smuts during his study years in England did not meet
Lord Kelvin because they had this common passion for "what exactly causes
evolution" and their lives did overlap. Jan Smuts studied law and
performed brilliantly. He had to study science on his own without any
tutoring, but his Holism and Evolution witness to how much he accomplished
on his wn. Perhaps thermodynamics was already too dreary in those days to
catch the attention of a knowledge seeker ;-)
One of the most compelling books which I have read, is that of Erich
Jantsch. I think it is called The Self-Organising Universe. Perhaps he and
others like Leo Rosenfeld would also have loved to participate in our
dialogue on this topic. Unfortunately, physics has become a victim of the
publish or perish syndrome just as every other subject of academy. Thus a
vast number of papers are produced on thousands of specific topics with a
few monographs here and there to bind some of the topics together. Those
who still want to work with physics as a whole have to face the perish as
alternative because publishing anything holistic is a much slower process.
Dwig, I think that many physicists, like most other disciplinarists in
other subjects, will simply be left cold by this dialogue.
With care and best wishes,
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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