318 The Poetry of Physics and The Physics of Poetry
emergence and systems of self-organization. They have also been able to
better understand the behavior of many non-linear systems ranging from
turbulent water flow to volatile stock markets and erratic traffic flows. A
self-organizing system is one in which its structure or pattern of
behaviour arises entirely from the local interactions of the components of
which it is composed. Examples of self-organizing systems in physics
ranging from the atomic to the cosmic scale include Bénard cells in fluid
dynamics, crystallization, spontaneous magnetization, superconductivity,
lasers, star formation and galaxy formation. There are many examples in
biology as well including the origin of life itself, the homeostasis of
living things and individual cells, bird flocking, fish schooling, the
human brain and human culture as in collective intelligence.
Until scientist discovered that complexity and chaos was more the
rule than the exception almost all scientists were reductionists in that
they believed that complex systems could be understood by reducing
them to the simple interactions of their component parts. They believed
that the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts and that
eventually one could explain the behaviour of a complex system in terms
of the behaviour of its components. Many scientists now acknowledge
that one can have systems that are deterministic but whose behaviour
cannot be predicted from the behavior of its components. These systems
are emergent in the sense that the system as a whole has properties that
none of its components possess and it is greater than the sum of its parts.
However there is still a large group of scientists who are still
reductionists who believe that eventually all phenomena whether
biological, psychological or sociological can be explained in terms of
basic physics. Proponents of strong artificial intelligence are an example
of one such group of reductionists.
Most scientists that accept complexity theory or emergence believe
that while one cannot predict the evolution of a complex non-linear
system that determinism is still a valid concept. Ilya Prigogine in his
book, The End of Certainty, takes an even more radical position and
claims not only is it not possible to predict the behaviour of complex
system but he claims that the notion of determinism is no longer viable.
“The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to
believe in determinism.” Prigogine has given up on determinism because
of irreversibility of many processes in nature as encompassed in the
notion of entropy we studied in Chapter 10. In Newtonian mechanics,
which is deterministic the equations describing the motion of bodies can