The Fifteenth Sir Nevill Mott Lecture was given by Professor Brian Josephson FRS (University of Cambridge) on Tuesday 16 March 2010.
Which Way for Physics?
Abstract
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The Sir Nevill Mott lecture is an annual lecture hosted by the Department. Of the fifteen speakers, starting with Sir Nevill himself, five have received a Nobel Prize. Professor Brian Josephson FRS, Emeritus Professor at Cambridge, spoke this year to a large audience. He had received the Nobel Prize in 1973 for the prediction (made while a research student) of supercurrent tunnelling through a barrier (the eponymous Josephson effect). His interests subsequently took a radically different turn, and he directs the Mind Matter Unification Project. His talk, "Which Way for Physics?", stressed the issues related to reductionism of the modern science such as incompatibility of Einsten Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. He has cited the original Phil Andersen’s paper: “More is different” and in this connection noted the importance of emergent phenomena in a broader range of many-body systems including social, information and conceptual networks. He told us that in general these systems, and especially conceptual networks where nodes migrate, decompose and evolve, must be treated as Complex Systems, where the cooperation between units creates a new quality and leads to a formation of new phenomena such as life. He proposed a hypothesis that life is some ultrastable phenomenon that originated as emergent property of some network evolution, where both nodes and coupling between them are changing, and resulted in a new quality. He has put many parallels to this idea illustrating it with the known examples of the network evolutions. In particular, he gave good examples of the jumpy evolution of language networks.
Brian Josephson has connected the ultrastability to a mutual cooperation between individual units or subsystems that can be seen in many contexts, and in particular such as to form communities to work together to achieve a required result to survive. In particular for an illustration of this concept of ultrastability he has mentioned a well known good example of weakly interacting clocks, that are going in synchrony, ie, the clocks originally going differently with time are emergent in a new stable synchronous state which is very resistive or ultrastable against all sort of disturbances.
He also noticed a deep role of mathematics as a concept which is behind anything in a life state: “Math does organisms and organisms do math to survive”?. Here by “do math” Prof. Josephson meant formation of a structure according to some logic mathematical laws, which are may be unknown. Of course also mathematics must be understood here as a concept (or as a logics) which is behind the formation and the dynamical evolution of these organisms. This “Josephson math” is still unknown and has nothing to do with a conventional calculus or pure mathematics which many people are doing while performing their everyday duties. Such tight binding Josephson relation between organisms and mathematics was connected to Wheeler's notion of observers bringing the universe into existence. He suggested that there existed a layer of "deep physics" and “deep mathematics” that underlies the physics and the routine mathematics we know, that may highlight the question “How did life begin?” that is the main question, which the modern science still cannot answer. The talk provoked a number of questions from the audience afterwards, and discussions continued after the lecture.
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