Most honest scientists would admit that at the core of what they do is an effort to understand the world around us; how nature works. In his book of the same name, Per Bak, a Danish physicist explains the theory of self-organized criticality (SOC). Historically, physics was always about finding ground truth, describing the natural laws that explain what we observe in every day life. It was even thought to be deterministic, such that, in principal, everything could be known.



Science has done much for society, good and bad, and the scientific method as it is, is very powerful, yet limited by its reductionist strategy. That is, mentally breaking a problem down into smaller and more isolated parts, and then applying this to the system as a whole. I have been recently been researching Emergence in complex systems. That is, using the reductionist method to a point, but keeping in mind its limitations. Per Bak would maintain that nature is a delicate balance always poised to unpredictably collapse in various ways. He gives the analogy of a sandpile. Think of a situation where you have a pitcher of sand, and you can pour out one grain at a time onto a flat table. At first, the sand grains fall and remain stable, then after a while, they pile up and up and the pile grows. But, after not too long, the pile cannot grow higher. Little sand "avalanches" of any scale begin to happen to stabilize the system again and then, as you add more, this pile will grow out, but keep the same proportional size.

He says that this analogy describes a lot of things in nature, like climate, the occurrence of wars and the economy. Take the economy... it might grow and grow due to our efforts, but it will show various size "avalanches", or recessions. Some can be small, as in the hourly fluctuation of stocks, others can be large, like a depression. The size of these collapses is stochastic... their occurrence is not predictable.

We cannot fully predict the trend of nature. We have influence, but only within a relatively small sphere. Nature tends toward disorder (the second law of thermodynamics), so collapses must happen, but when... we don't know. Indeed, we CAN'T know. Earthquake occurrences are another example of non-linearity in nature. Many times they are small, sometimes they are big. The open-ended scale of the magnitude of earthquakes (or of stocks), are called fractals. They were first described, actually quite recently, by Benoît Mandelbrot. Fractals exhibit self-similarity over all scales. We think of fractals as art, and they are quite symmetric and artisic, but this type of self-similar pattern is seen all across nature, from stocks to snowflakes, ferns or the coastline of Britain. What is the underlying symmetry of the universe that is manifest in these natural patterns? At a fundamental level I think it is perhaps related to the magnitude of the four forces of nature, gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces. Why do these forces have the seemingly "tuned" values they have? I don't know, but in any case, if they were any different, even by a minuscule fraction of one percent, the universe would not have evolved life as we know it, or perhaps not at all.

If any of this stuff interests you, check out the links above. I have also been put on to a book by a good friend of mine, Darren Roach, called: The Hidden Connections: Integrating The Biological, Cognitive, And Social Dimensions Of Life Into A Science Of Sustainability. I have yet to read it, but I trust his recommendation. Check it out!

Peace,
Grant