|
Dear Judith,
I read you posting of August 5 with delight, when I came back from a short
absence from the list.
I have a few words on the following quotation from your post. That is
"To reiterate: Lee Smolin wrote, "So is it possible to follow the
path of Einstein? To do so, you cannot be a crank; you must be a well-trained
physicist, literate in current theories and aware of their limitations..."
Do you suppose he'll react with horror over the fact that Robert Rosen was a
biologist? What's in a label like that, anyway? Isn't it all part of the same
effort?
As the real complexity starts, I believe, in fields
above and beyond physics it is essential to have a good understanding of
mathematics and physics but not enough. The science is still dealing, be it
mechanistic or quantistic, within rather simple systems of
which adjectives are easy to describe with no potential entanglement. It
works well for physics but not for meta-physics that takes its base from
physical realm but moves step by step towards higher realms within which the
biology takes the lead with a potential of uplifting all with it. That
is why I see a great potential for us pursuing RR's ideas as one way (if
not unique) to quench the aspirations of meta-scientists and theorists, at least
on our side, presently moving to a unity within a non-linear process, at
times nervously owing the elusiveness of the matter.
I am in and out in the list, like many others. I may have
been missing many insights already revealed therein. But there are a few of us
are the pillars and recieving many descriptions from the parts of this
wholistically inspired list. How about taking INTUITION realm as next to biology
and test if RR's theory provides an sound framework. Which kind of modelling may
one think of, as this is the first area above the biology where mostly
intangibles dwell?? Findings then may be applied back to lower realms to deal
with their so far unattended niches.
Addendum: (mostly meant for Judith as an artist) Schubert
expressed the higher aspirations of the people of his time by his nearly
daily composed music-songs (lider) which were also sang daily among
like minded people. Words and languages are the offsprings of the rationality to
make the life and connections easy. At out time more than any other times the
humanity needs to find other means to express. Already after Shubert, Mendhelson
composed songs without words for minds ready to live in higher realms. Mahler
perhaps did the best with his Earth Songs more or less as his testament to the
humanity which were then in a deep turmoil as we are now, the boliling times
before the WWI. The human struggle has never ended since then, as prisoned by
the scientific and industrial revolutions and their offspring modernism. We need
to transcend them all with a new wholistic science encompasses all humanistic
fields whose movements hard to measure but sensed. We have now a new tool. The
computer intelliegence. It has to guide the human
intelligence/wisdom/intuition ... Can we take the RR's theory as our
framework, within its fool-proof description, as a guide to
compose our daily contributions which express our views beyond
the words used to sharpen our ability for seeing more out of the work of genious
people.
My best.
Ayten
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 10:51
PM
Subject: The Einstein issue of Discover
Magazine
I've been reading the latest issue of Discover Magazine, which is
dedicated to Albert Einstein and his work in science. It's a really marvelous
set of articles by all different people, and I've only read maybe half of them
so far. But the one by Lee Smolin, "Einstein's Lonely Path" is particularly
insightful and profound. From my perspective, in my position as both the
daughter and friend of Robert Rosen ("Biology's Einstein", one article,
written about ten years ago, labeled him), I found this piece by Lee
Smolin to be very moving. Fortunately, my father wasn't nearly as lonely
in his personal life as Einstein apparently was, but his professional
experiences were practically identical in a slew of ways. Einstein had higher
highs and lower lows; my father decided early on to avoid the politics of
Nobel prize committees and fame. But the times were different, just one
generation later than Einstein's day, and my father was able to avoid some of
those pitfalls (he probably had Einstein's well-documented experiences to
thank for that, I suspect).
Smolin writes:
"I think a sober assessment is that up till now, almost all
of us who work in theoretical physics have failed to live up to Einstein's
legacy. His demand for a coherent theory [that would apply universally and
represent accurately the Laws of Nature] was uncompromising. It has not been
reached-- not by quantum theory, not by special or general relativity, not by
anything invented since [this guy obviously hasn't read any of
my father's work-- which is outside of physics, but pertains
deeply] Einstein's moral clarity, his insistence that we should
accept nothing less than a theory that gives a completely coherent account of
individual phenomena, cannot be followed unless we reject almost all
contemporary theoretical physics as insufficient.
So is it possible to follow the path of Einstein? To do so,
you cannot be a crank; you must be a well-trained physicist, literate in
current theories and aware of their limitations. And you must insist on
absolute clarity in your own work, rather than follow any fad or popular
direction. Given the pressures of competition for academic positions, to
follow Einstein's path is to risk the price that he paid: unemployment in
spite of abundant talent and skill at the craft of theoretical
physics.
... Let us be frank and admit that most of us have neither
the courage nor the patience to emulate Einstein. We should instead honor
Einstein by asking whether we can do anything to ensure that in the
future, those who do follow Einstein's path, who approach science as
uncompromisingly as he did, have less risk of unemployment... and
marginalization... of the sort he suffered. If we can do this, if we can
make the path easier for those few who do follow him, we may make possible a
revolution in science that even Einstein failed to
achieve."
This article grabbed me because I believe that my father's work
(collectively "Rosennean Complexity Theory") is the basis for that revolution.
What Einstein was trying to do, and what he kept trying to do, was look at the
relationships between things, but he never formalized that aspect fully enough
for it to sink in, either in Physics or in science in general. But what does
"relativity" mean? He was saying that where things are in relation to other
things (i.e.; the organization) has a significant causal impact that
cannot be ignored if we really want to know why things happen in the universe
the way they do. He had the "unified" theory he had been searching
for in his hands already but he didn't have quite enough
time to put all the pieces together before he died.
My father often mused that Einstein's work made it possible for
him to see the subtle flaws at the bottom of physics far more clearly,
because it stripped away so many of the larger flaws in Newtonian
mechanics. I personally believe that the reason Einstein was stymied in his
drive for a unified theory was due to his lack of experience with biology.
Biological systems are far more complex than atoms, and it is precisely
that complexity which is not addressed by physics. But physicists rarely
venture into biology, as can be seen by some of the things the writer of this
article says. To reiterate: Lee Smolin wrote, "So is it possible to follow
the path of Einstein? To do so, you cannot be a crank; you must be a
well-trained physicist, literate in current theories and aware of their
limitations..." Do you suppose he'll react with horror over the fact that
Robert Rosen was a biologist? What's in a label like that, anyway? Isn't it
all part of the same effort?
I'll have to try and get in touch with him,
methinks.....
Judith
|