These concepts don’t exist at the level of individual atoms or molecules, and are very difficult to derive from the microscopic laws.Īs physicists continue to search for cracks in the Standard Model (SM) and Einstein’s general theory of relativity, could these natural laws in fact be emergent from a deeper reality? And emergence is not limited to the world of the very small, but by its very nature skips across orders of magnitude in scale. Good examples are the wetness of water and the superconductivity of an alloy. It deals with properties of a macroscopic system that have no meaning at the level of its microscopic building blocks. Emergence says that new and different kinds of phenomena arise in large and complex systems, and that these phenomena may be impossible, or at least very hard, to derive from the laws that govern their basic constituents. If discovered, all physical phenomena would follow from the application of its fundamental laws.Ī complementary perspective to reductionism is that of emergence. This view of nature is most evident in the search for a theory of everything – an idea that is nowadays more common in popularisations of physics than among physicists themselves. Particle physics is at its heart a reductionistic endeavour that tries to reduce reality to its most basic building blocks. Emergent simplicity The evolution of a murmuration of starlings cannot be described by following the motion of any individual bird. Erik Verlinde sizes up the Standard Model, gravity and intelligence as candidates for future explanation as emergent phenomena. Many physical laws ‘emerge’ from complexity thanks to a process of data compression.
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