Tuesday and again yesterday I went to hear Robert B. Laughlin giving the so called Paul Bernays Lectures at ETH Zurich.* Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize in physics 1998, started Tuesday evening by talking about his popular 2006 book “A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down”. What he said did not seem very new to 90 per cent odd of the public (physics students, precisely male physics students). However, it was new for me.
Nature, he said, is basically just laws of organisation. Take ice for example. Make it small enough and there is no difference to water anymore. It’s water. Or it could even be something completely different. There is no difference between liquid and solid anymore when they are very small. Only organised, it gets the qualities we experience. Consequently, Newton’s laws of gravity only hold true for collective things, as soon as you start taking things apart, they don’t. Thats’ why everybody loves big data, make your sample small, and you have problems.
Yesterday Laughlin continued by talking about lengths. We do not know what makes bodies have they size they have. When we grow we grow proportionally. Why? We don’t know. When a Salamander loses a leg he grews another one, and it fits! How does he do it? We don’t know, said Laughlin. Sure, there are theories (see e.g. this one), but according to Laughlin they don’t get it all right.
I am very happy that I didn’t make it to Laughlin’s last lecture today. He probably would have destroyed my last believe in the reality of things. I had pasta instead (I know, it was there just because it had organised itself earlier. At least, I knew why it had the length it had).
* The lectures were established to honour former ETH professor Bernays (1888-1977). It’s a three-parts lecture series dedicated to the philosophy of the exact sciences.