02. July 2020
Convergence
When I was a kid, I loved to play the “why” game. You pick a topic, anything will do, and keep asking “why?” until your adult victim inevitably surrenders and says “that’s just the way it is.” I don’t think I was alone in my childhood enthusiasm for this pastime. The frustrating, and wonderful, part of the game is that it’s “why” all the way down. My father was a physicist and a teacher, so he could go on for quite a while, but eventually even he would run out of answers. His last one was a bit different though: “I don’t know, why don’t you find out?”
So I became a scientist.
Tree-like pillars branch towards the ceiling of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain.
photo: Robert A. Brown
If you play the why game enough you might notice something strange. Those endless ribbons of infuriating interrogative converge. If you start with “why is the sky blue?” or “why can’t I walk through walls?” you might be surprised to find yourself eventually ending up in the same place. There are connections between things that seem completely different.
Convergence is at the foundation of the philosophy of science: the idea that the complicated things we observe in the world are consequences of simple, general, universal underlying principles. Moving in the opposite direction is emergence, the observation that a composite system can have properties and behaviour its constituent parts do not.
This is the first entry in this blog. Friends and colleagues have requested a series about statistics, and articles about artificial intelligence and photography. I’ll probably write about whatever strikes me as interesting. But anybody who thinks emergence is cool clearly respects a good theme, so there it is.
PS: One of my other activities as a child was watching TV. We only had two channels, so usually that meant educational programs my grandfather taped and mailed on VHS. One of my favourites was “Connections,” and “Connections2,” BBC and TLC (respectively) series about unexpected connections between events in history. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like anyone is streaming them, but you can buy a DVD set from Amazon, or find some episodes on YouTube.