Saturday, December 27, 2008

Aether and emergence paradigm.

Emergence concept is one of four postmodern paradigms, by which contemporary physics converges to Aether based models of reality. The another ones are unparticle physics of Howard Georgi, Process physics of R.T.Cahill (Wikipedia article deleted by trolls already) and Constructal theory of A. Bejan. Aether concept covers all these particular theories into single one. Until now, emergence concept helped to cover the Aether concept for mainstream physics before publicity. Surprisingly (but quite logically from platonic perspective of mainstream science), while the causal basis of emergence concept is the least understood, it remains accepted in best- if not trendy - by mainstream, as the fast growing number of arXiv HEP articles indicates.

Being quite ancient, emergence concept has no single author, but the most significant proponent of this approach is Standford physicist R. Laughlin, particularly due his personal experience with emergent high pressure phenomena during nuclear research in Livermore. In his popular book "A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down" (2005) he argues for emergence as a replacement for reductionism in accordance to 1972 article by Phil W. Anderson More is different, extended later by preprint of Mile Gu et all More really is different.
Prof. Laughing's stance can be understood by the way, it has no meaning to try to extrapolate the theories too far, until we don't understand their postulates well. It's not a reductionists stance, rather sort of logical optimization of approach. For example, when we start to develop a formal theory from two or more sets of mutually inconsistent postulates, we'll always finish in singular landscape of many possible solutions, because of poorly conditioned condition at the very beginning. Under such circumstances has no meaning to develop some extrapolations based on consecutive logic too deeply - we should rather develop the super-symmetric part of theory, based on parallelized approach, i.e. the intuition.
The conceptual basis of emergence in AWT is trivial and based on the fact, every entity of causal reality (a "particle") should be of positive curvature to remain observable, and the effects of surface curvature are cumulative, so that in every system of high number of such particles the total curvature leads to symmetry breaking and formation of new entities in less or more distant space-time perspective (1, 2). This remains valid for every set of entities of causal reality, based on consecutive logic, i.e. reality driven by single time arrow. From this point of view we can call the Aether model a theory of emergence and vice-versa, albeit I'm in doubt, whether the emergence paradigm can be understood without particle concept at all (and by Ed Witten the same could be said about the rest of string theorists, with honour exception of L. Motl and a few others).
The practical consequence of emergence in physics is every process involving so called spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB), which is not understood by the same way, like the emergence itself by mainstream physics. As a practical example of SSB can serve every phase transform, the condensation in particular. The nested condensation of supercritical fluid can serve as an iconic example of emergence phenomena, on which whole the AWT is based.
We can met with emergence phenomena in many places in psychology, sociology and biology. A classical example of emergent process is so called imagination - i.e. the creative process of "new" ideas involving phase transforms of waves of electrochemical activity inside of human brain. Because we understand the Universe by mean of ideas, it's nothing strange, we can understood it by mean of emergence as well. The theory of prime number, Fibonacci serii and modular forms are the main areas of emergence theory in math, Penrose tiles in geometry.
In art the manifestation of emergence is manifested by so called serigraphy, i.e. the artistic approach based on repetition of elements based on stencil technique of katazome Japanese art. Albeit the most advantage examples of emergent aspects we can met in quasicrystalline structures used in Islamic art and architecture in particular, which are used in metamaterial and terrahertz technologies. The most famous promoter of serigraphy in modern art is Andy Warhol. The emergence principle is contained in fact, the repetetive application of elements brings new quality into artistic testimonial. In this sense, the violation of symmetry in serigraphy has a particular impact due its apparent evolutionary aspect: people usually prefers the patterns, which are enabling further evolution of ideas and perception, so they can become a part of transformation process.
Andy Warhol page provides visitors with Warhol's bio, over 1100 of his works, exclusive articles, and up-to-date Warhol exhibition listings.