Robert B. LaughlinCritiques

LA LEY DE LA FRONTERA
CONVIVIR CON LA INCERTIDUMBRE
MONTE NEWTON
AGUA, HIELO Y VAPOR
EL GATO DE SCHRODINGER
LA COMPUTADORA CUANTICA
VINO KLITZING
RESOLVI EL PROBLEMA DURANTE LA CENA
LA FAMILIA NUCLEAR
LA ESTRUCTURA DEL ESPACIO-TIEMPO
FESTIVAL DE BARATIJAS
EL LADO OSCURO DE LA PROTECCION
LOS PRINCIPIOS DE LA VIDA
GUERREROS DE LAS GALAXIAS
PICNIC AL SOL
LA EDAD DE LA EMERGENCIA

The author, a professor of physics at Stanford, discusses various possible ways of obtaining and storing energy in the future. I remain skeptical about many of his forecasts, but one insight that I suspect is true is his assertion that we as a species will always opt for whatever source of energy is cheapest. For the foreseeable future, he claims this will be fossil fuels - oil, coal, and natural gas. Once these are exhausted (a couple hundred years hence), we'll probably opt for nuclear, with some supplementation from solar in places in which it makes economic sense. I think, actually I hope he's underestimating potential innovations in various areas, including bio-tech and nano-tech, and even cultural changes, that will make other sources of energy economical.

This is weird overall. You could skip chapters 2 and 3 entirely. Not really of much help except for the part about fast breeding nuclear reactors.

This is weird overall. You could skip chapters 2 and 3 entirely. Not really of much help except for the part about fast breeding nuclear reactors.

Poorly argued...Laughlin is rather inconsistent, so it's not even very clear what he's arguing for. He fails to make several crucial distinctions, so that the freedom to think about certain subjects (say, nuclear physics) is not clearly distinguished from the freedom to act on one's knowledge (such as the freedom to sell nuclear secrets to North Korea if you feel like it). The basic problem running throughout the book is a moral-practical dichotomy, so that he argues for a sort of platonic ideal of intellectual freedom, while regularly being forced to recognize that it is not at all practical or even desirable in many cases. And his basic premise that information should be equally available to everyone isn't just false, it's impossible!

Surprisingly, the best chapter is probably the one on patent law, which he concludes: "This unhappy state of affairs has now led to loud cries for tort reform, both from concerned individuals and from businesses being bled dry by legal costs. Yet while legislatures may enact reforms soon, most people think they are unlikely to do what it takes to restore respect for technical law: ban patents for methods of reasoning, methods of communicating, discovery of things widely viewed as self-evident, and discovery of phenomena that occur on their own when humans are not present." That's more or less accurate, though it could stand to be more clear (it depends, for instance, on what exactly he means by "methods of communicating"), but this is about as clear and accurate as he gets.

Mostly an extended musing on the distinction between fundamental physical laws and emergent phenomena and how fuzzy, artificial, and misleading the distinction can be. Long on personal anecdotes, there is little if any new info on physics per se here. There's a discussion of the uselessness of String Theory and an argument that, contrary to what some believe, there is still much to be learned about basic physics.

You would think that a book with the subtitle 'reinventing physics from the bottom down' would give a coherent presentation of how physics should be 'reinvented'. But no, this Nobel Prize winner mostly recounts amusing stories from his days as a physicist without much rhyme or reason to it. I suppose he can write whatever he wants, but he should not choose an ambitious-sounding subtitle for a patently unambitious book.

(This review is a slightly edited copy from a post on my own blog, eihek.com/blog.)

I have just finished reading this book, with the rather bold subtitle, by a Physics Nobel Prize winner.

It is a bit hard to know what to think about it. It starts off with a very strong program, and makes some very persuasive arguments early on, but in the end I am not sure whether it lived up to the expectations. It’s not that I disagree with the author (as a complete amateur in the field of Physics, how could I?) but that the book frequently presents strong claims without similarly strong arguments to back them up. Instead it often makes some rather general points, or tells some vaguely related anecdote, as if it assumes that the rest of the argument is self-evident or something the reader should already be familiar with.

But, if this sounds negative, I should stress that I nevertheless enjoyed reading it very much (not least due to those anecdotes).

The basic thesis of the book is that the search for the ultimate truth in Physics (and other fields) through the reductionist search for smaller and smaller “elementary” components is mis-guided because the fundamental truth occurs through a process of organization, that is emergence—the main theme of the book—at a higher level.

In Physics this means at the level where you have a largish number of atoms or molecules, such that, for example, the phase of matter—e.g., solid, liquid or gas—is established, and quantum weirdnesses are irrelevant or insignificant. When the number of atoms is much smaller than this, you cannot really tell if you have a liquid or a gas, and the position and motion of individual atoms are unknowable by the uncertainty principle. This, and the fact that there is no sharp boundary between these “small” and “large” territories, is well known and one source of the conceptual difficulties with quantum theory.

Well, my understanding is that the opposite of reductionism is holism, which in this case should mean taking in the whole of reality—small and large—in a single unified framework. In other words, rather than saying the fundamental truth lies at some particular, preferred level, to understand and explain all the levels, from the quarks to the cosmos, and how they are connected, in one go. But isn’t this basically what mainstream physicists are trying to do, with their search for grand unified theories of everything?

Part of the ultimate truth must therefore be to actually explain this emergence. How does it come about? How do the physical characteristics of matter, time and energy transition between the small (quantum mechanical), the large (emergent) and the super-large (cosmic)? Again, this seems to be a busy research area, though, under the headings of chaos and complexity.

The main value of this book is as a realist, down-to-earth antidote to all the whackier attempts to extrapolate the quantum uncertainties to large-scale effects—such as the “theory” that every time any particle makes a random move under quantum rules the whole universe instantly splits into multiple copies for the different options available to this particle. The absurdity of such an idea just shows that the extrapolation actually doesn’t work, and that there is therefore something missing in the underlying theory, however well it works in the atomic-sized domain.

Anyway, the next book I am reading now is Lee Smolin’s “The Trouble with Physics“, which, judging by the introduction and first couple of chapters is also going to address the problem with the current state of Physics (basically, that following about 200 years of regular important discoveries, there has been no significant advance since about 1970). One of the themes stressed early on in this book is the importance of going back to basics, and history, to understand what has driven scientific revolutions (in particular earlier unifications), and to stress the actual, practical importance of falsifiability and other requirements to scientific theories. I am curious to see where this goes.

Stimulating and urbane, but hampered by Laughlin's desire to skate over topics from comparison of genes to computer code, to attitudes towards incest, to the kinds of conversation he apparently has at parties (p. 115), all with an inconsistent commitment to supportive referencing. I was left particularly unsure what he thinks morality consists in, except that he apparently thinks it involves rights and responsibilities. 'The ethical issues of protecting embryos... have fundamentally to do with the rights of emerging communities...' (p. 111). They do? '[S]elling... is the true purpose of fun' (p. 123). Is he dragging in some mysterious universal teleology or just being flippant? And so on.

It would have worked better, then, to use the later chapters to develop a more nuanced picture of economic activity and its implications. The early chapters are much more successful (though there are still some excessive generalisations), going some way to build up a picture of knowledge as it is deployed in society and particularly within scientific practice, and of the implications for that of political and legal regimes. What it fails to do, in a debate already supplied with some noteworthy legal and economic thinking, is to distinguish itself either on similar terms or specifically as the contribution of a Nobel-winning physicist.

Das bisher beste – und mit aktuellen wissenschaftlichen Material – Buch zum Thema Emergenz. Das Buch gliedert sich in viele unterschiedliche physikalische Fallstudien, die aus unterschiedlichen Feldern das Phänomen der Emergenz nachweisen. Laughlin vertritt einen hierarchischen Aufbau der Welt, wie er schon bei Michael Polanyi in seiner "theory of ontologigical stratification" (Theorie der ontologischen Schichtung) und Nicolai Hartmann "Der Aufbau der realen Welt" angelegt ist.

Argues that reductionism should take a back seat to emergentism. Laughlin specializes, not surprisingly, in condensed matter physics (formerly called solid state physics).