Dear Organlearners,
I had to change the thread from "Which came first?" to the above.
Juan Robertson <juant@wolfenet.com> writes in reply to Keith Cowan:
>>Much of the social systems thinking is still in the "newtonian
>>phase", whereas the chaos thinking introduces notions that
>>are more akin to quantum thinking. The dramatic progress that
>>science has made since that breakthrough seems to be lacking
>>in much of the work going on in social systems.
>
>Does anyone have any basis for saying that the quantum model is
>really suitable? Or could it also be a bad model?
Greetings Juan,
Your questions are very important.
Far too many people belief that Newtonian Mechanics (NM) has been replaced
by Quantum Mechanics (QM). This is not true! QM has merely "extended" NM.
What do I mean by this?
In the Primer on Entropy, I have tried to show among other things that NM
culminated in the Law of Energy Conservation (LEC). Whereas NM culminated
in the LEC, QM begins with this LEC and culminates in something else. The
reason why QM is able to go further than NM, is that it connects LEC with
a second thing. (See the essentiality fruitfulness.) It connects the LEC
with a complementary duality of nature known as the "wave-particle"
duality.
This duality entails an INVERSE proportionality between the "wave" and
"particle". The bigger the particle and thus its NM properties like energy
and momentum, the smaller its wave properties like wavelength and period.
In NM the motion of big (macroscopical) bodies are studied. Thus their
wave properies are unobservably small and can hence be neglected. In QM
the motion of small bodies(microsopical particles like electrons and
atoms) are studied. On this small scale their wave properties are clearly
observable and hence cannot be ignored. Erwin Sshroedinger has succeeded
in his famous equation to combine these wave properties in a novel manner
with the LEC.
Niels Bohr has formulated his famous Correspondence Principle (CP) to
guide this transition between NM and QM. The CP says that the results
(predictions) of QM must reduce into the results of NM as we scale up from
the microscopic to the macroscopic level.
When we try to use QM rather than NM to predict the motion of big bodies
such as the planets of our solar system, QM is definitely the bad model
while NM is the good model.
The Correspondence Principle (CP) of QM let me think of the work of Flood
and Jackson in TSI (Total Systems Intervention). CP and TSI are not the
same thing. But in TSI we also get the notion that a model has a
restricted domain of application.
In my Systems Thinking it is not QM itself which is valuable for social
systems, but these deeper patterns of QM (like LEC and complementary
duality) which are important.
Readers may wonder why only the LEC and not also the LEP (Law of Entropy
Production) plays a role in QM (Quantum Mechanics). This was indeed the
case up to the middle seventies. Physicists tried to curtail the LEP into
the LEC since the LEP is alien to NM (Newtonian Mechanics). Since they did
not accept the LEP as the complementary dual to the LEC, they could became
aware of the role of LEC in QM. But another breakthrough by Prigogine and
coworkers was to discover that traditional QM is, metaphorically speaking,
only the one leg of a two-legged creature. Technically it may be called
the "hermitian" leg. They discovered the other leg which may be called
the "star-hermitian" leg.
What is the difference between "hermitian" (traditional) QM and
"star-hermitian" (post-modern) QM? It will take many contributions to
explain it to you. But if your really want to get your teeth into its very
abstract mathematics, Prigogine has given a nice summary in his book "From
Being to Becoming". For the rest of us, I will merely try to desribe their
"flavours". Hermitian QM is being-like (structural)while star-hermitian QM
is becoming-like (procedural). Complementary duals in hermitian QM are
protective, symmetric and reflexsive whereas the complementary duals in
star-hermitian QM are productive, asymmetric and transitive. Finally, the
two are not dialectical to each other, but complementary. Thus it is
foolish to exclude the one from the other.
A lot of this will make no sense to you because of lack of training and
experience. But in all this obscurity I hope that two messages come
through -- the importance of complementary dualities, or what Bohr called
the "complementarity principle", as well as the importance of what Bohr
called the "correspondence principle".
When does the "complementarity priciple" become important? When the things
(objects) which we observe and the things (instruments) which we use to
make such observations, have the same order of complexity. For example,
when we observe the electron (object) in an atom with a photon
(instrument), the electron and photon are of the same order. Thus we have
to bring in a mechanics which acknowledges complementarity, i.e quantum
mechanics. But when we observe the motion of the moon with a couple of
photons, they are of completely different orders. Likewise, when we
observe a social system (object) with a Systems Thinking (instrument)
which tries to reflect the totality of the social system, then the ST has
to acknowledge complementarity.
When does the "correspondence principle" become important? When our
knowledge emerge to a new level of understanding because of a paradigm
shift. We still recognise the old patterns of understanding, but these
patterns are now much richer. By "walking in the shoes of others", we
become aware of this "correspondence priciple". We have to try walking in
the shoes of others who live in the same age as us, but in a different
culture. But we also have to try walking in the shoes of others in the
past.
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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