On My Mind II

A Repertoire of Examples

Notions that recur include (this list is not meant to be explanatory, merely mentions): pollution, the vacuum, kinship, gravity, the sacred, design, the meaningfulness of formalism; layers, hierarchy, unity in multiplicity, composition, linearity, exchange and clustering. Recurrent examples include decisionmaking and conversion, uncertainty, the city, and of late Diego Rivera’s murals (especially the Detroit one). From my training as a physicist, the various solutions to the two-dimensional Ising model of ferromagnetism, and the flow of ideas from researcher to researcher, a matter of influence and teaching, have come to be important to me.

Put differently, pollution and mixture vs. purity, or, the sacred vs. the profane; a hierarchy of stages, where at each stage new phenomena crystalize out; the grouping of objects into families and families into clans…; the belief that in any such formalism, much as algebra allows us to do geometry, the autonomous steps in that formalism (our manipulating symbols according to the rules) are actually concretely meaningful; and, that a coherent design is actually discernible without our believing it to be providential.

Also, those levels and layers form a hierarchy with emergent and differentiated phenomena at each stage; that a design is an apparent unity within multiple presentations; that composition is a wondrous invention which when well done appears natural and God-given, even if it was “botched and bungled” (Hume) as if by a committee; and whatever there is would seem to be a matter of exchange and interaction of elements, the cumulative effect of such exchanges transcending what we understand about exchange.

Moreover, we might well provide a mechanical explanation of the world, as provided by economics.  But actual action is often transcending what we might expect to be rational or balanced. It is not that we are risk-takers, so much as we ride uncertainty, knowing that in engaging with what is uncertain we will invent our ways forward (although some of the time we are surely to be sacrificed).

Another list of the examples I have in mind as I write this essay, a legacy from my earlier work and study:

a.      Riding Uncertainty—Here “uncertainty” is a matter of an unknown-unknown, when you do not know what you do not know, and so the conventional decision-theoretic paradigm cannot be applied. I then speak of “riding uncertainty,” the model being Special Forces Soldiers, particle physicist seeking beyond the Standard Model, and entrepreneurs. In these cases one is not so much risk-taking as taking on contingencies as they come and working beyond them.

b.     Primes and Particles—There is a lovely analogy between how number systems grow as we add in to the rational numbers other numbers such as the square root of 7 or the square root of -1, for then some numbers that were once prime are no longer so, and how the realm of elementary particles grows as we increase the energy of interaction, where what was once elementary, say the atom, is now seen as composite (electrons and nuclei).

c.      Gravity and the City—The theory of general relativity relates the density of mass-energy to the way objects move in accord with gravity, in effect there being two layers in space time. One layer is the mass energy, the other is the path of particles, and those layers are intimately related. Similarly, in a city, the density of people and activities is intimately related to how people move in a city.

d.     Unity in Multiplicity—Often, in physical explanations there may be several very different ways of computing and understanding what is going on. These different ways are presumably about that same object, and so that multiplicity illuminates that object from various angles. Moreover, it is often possible to prove the equivalence of the various ways--well before their coming to the same answer.

e.      The City as Composed—Cities are almost always seen as having an order and structure, albeit with exceptions and some disorder. Much the same happens in works of art. How do we find composition in the world?

f.       The social science of urban places is a matter of space and place, structure and dynamics, clustering, flows and finance, heterogeneity and hierarchy, neighborhoods, the economy, exchange and interaction, the processes of city building and gathering the resources needed to do such building.

These examples inform my thinking, they provide ready language and mechanisms, and give me confidence I understand something. They are the foundations for my analogies.