( previous : Up: erase weblog next )

Emergence ch14: The Theory of Everything

in project: emergence-advent

Robert Laughlin and David Pines - The Theory of Everything (1999)

Read as PDF

In which Laughlin and Pines continue the many-body physics discussion of Anderson, arguing that the "more is different" tenet holds so strongly in certain contexts that the idea of a reductive Theory Of Everything is effectively impossible.

The objective of a Theory Of Everything is a set of base-level equations which underpin all activity in the universe, from which the phenomena of higher levels can be constructed. Evidently, this is quickly computationally unfeasible for (say) a biosystem. Laughlin and Pines' position is stronger than this, however, citing principles such as Laughlin's fractional quantum Hall effect as transcendent "higher organizing principles", in that:

"..they would continue to be true and lead to exact results even if the Theory of Everything were changed. Thus the existence of these effects is profoundly important, for it shows us that for at least some fundamental things in nature the Theory of Everything is irrelevant."

The effects in question relate to their notion of a "quantum protectorate", key to the FQHE, in which the effects of macroscopic principles eclipse those on the microscopic level, to the point that the latter becomes negligible. The consequence is that strongly emergent laws do exist, structurally independent of the underlying equations that govern single-particle interactions.

My flimsy understanding of theoretical physics forbids me from attempting any further analysis of this paper. Interested readers can find it here; Laughlin's A Different Universe expands his ideas into book form, most notably the view that emergent processes should be the central focus of theoretical physics.