In existographies, Robert Laughlin (1950-) (CR:5) is an American physicist noted for his 2000 to 2005 protected states theory of emergence over reduction theory, oft-cited by theologians, ID-proponents, ontic opening and emergence scholars.
Overview
In 2000, Laughlin, in his “The Theory of Everything”, cited by Terrence Deacon (2011), elaborates on American physicist Philip Anderson’s 1972 “More is Different” — which addressed the controversy surrounding the reductionist hypothesis, via the emergent properties argument that certain physical properties, e.g. solid state forms of matter, emerge at higher levels of organization — to argue for a “protected states” theory of emergence, according to which there is a certain insulation between levels of physical dynamics. [1]
In 2005, Laughlin published A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, wherein he argues for emergence as a replacement for reductionism, but a book that is not much expanded beyond his 2000 article; the following is an example quote, as cited as an argument platform by priest-chemist-engineer James Salmon (2009): [1]
“Much as I dislike the idea of ages, I think a good case can be made that science has now moved from an Age of Reductionism to an Age of Emergence, a time when the search for ultimate causes of things shifts from the behavior of parts to the behavior of the collective.”
This, given the title of the book, seems to be an extrapolate down approach ideology.
Laughlin is grouped, thematically, according to Erland Lagerroth (2013), into the following carousel of ontic opening scholars: Erich Jantsch (The Self Organizing Universe, 1979), Ilya Prigogine (the mentor to Erich Jantsch), Gregory Bateson, Karel Kosïk, Fritjof Capra, Ken Wilber, Henryk Skolimowski, Erwin Laszlo, Edward Goldsmith, Theodore Roszak, Elisabet Sahtouris, Susan Oyama, Anthony Wilden, Nicholas Maxwell, E F Schumacher, Amit Goswami, Lynn Margulis, Rupert Sheldrake, Henri Bortoft on Goethe, Harold Morowitz, Steven Johnson, Steven Strogatz, Stephen Wolfram, Stephan Harding, David Abram, Mary Midgley, Brian Goodwin, Stuart Kauffman, Robert Ulanowicz, Sven Jørgensen, and Enzo Tiezzi.
Quotes | On
The following are Laughlin related quotes:
“No doubt, it [second law] would seem to contradict the many observations of emergence of ordered non-organic structures (like crystals or waves and cyclones) and organic structures (like DNA and human beings), seemingly out of disordered chaos, as evidenced by the physics Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin.”
— Claes Johnson (2008), “Computational Foundation of Thermodynamics”
Quotes
The following are noted quotes:
“Much of present-day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends antitheories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories: they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Charles Darwin originally conceived as a great theory, has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action? Evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken? Evolution! The human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause!”
— Robert Laughlin (2005), A Different Universe (pgs. 168-69); cited (Ѻ) by William Dembski , 2005
References
1. (a) Laughlin, Robert B. and Pines, David. (2000). “The Theory of Everything”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97(1):28-31.
(b) Deacon, Terrence W. (2011). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (pg. 200). W.W. Norton & Co.
2. (a) Laughlin, Robert. (2005). A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (quote, pg. 208). Basic Books.
(b) Salmon, James F. (2009). “Emergence in Evolution” (abs), Foundations of Chemistry, 11(1):21-32.
3. (a) Hoffman, Johan, Johnson, Claes, and Nazarov, Murtazo. (2008). “Computational Foundation of Thermodynamics”, (PDF), 18-pages, May 19.
(b) Laughlin, Robert. (2005). A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (quote, pg. 208). Basic Books.
External links
● Robert B. Laughlin – Wikipedia.
