Murray Gell-Mann
The Quark
and the Jaguar
Preface
The Quark and the Jaguar is not an autobiography, although it does contain some reminiscences about my childhood and a number of anecdotes about colleagues in science. Nor is it primarily concerned with my work on the quark , although a sizable chunk of the book is devoted to some observations on the fundamental laws of physics, including the behavior of quarks. I may some day write a scientific autobiography, but my aim in this volume is to set forth my views on an emerging synthesis at the cutting edge of inquiry into the character of the world around us-the study of the simple and the complex. That Study has started to bring together in a new way material from a great number of different fields in the physical, biological, and behavioral sciences and even in the arts and humanities. It carries with it a point of view that facilitates the making of connections, sometimes between facts or ideas that seem at first glance very remote from each other. Moreover, it begins to answer some gnawing questions that many of us, whether working in the sciences or not, continue to ask ourselves about what simplicity and complexity really mean.
The book is divided into four parts. At the beginning of the first part, I describe some personal experiences that led me to write it. Taking long walks in tropical forests, studying birds, and planning nature conservation activities, I became excited by the idea of sharing with readers my growing awareness of the links between the fundamental laws of physics and the world we see around us. All my life I have loved exploring the realm of living things, but my professional life has been devoted mostly to research on the fundamental laws. These laws underlie all of science (in a sense that is discussed in this book) but often seem far removed from most experience, including a great deal of experience in the other sciences. Reflecting on questions of simplicity and complexity, we perceive connections that help to link together all the phenomena of nature, from the simplest to the most complex.
When my wife read me Arthur Sze's poem in which he mentions the quark and the jaguar, I was immediately struck by how well the two images fitted my subject. The quarks are basic building blocks of all matter. Every object that we see is composed, more or less, of quarks and electrons. Even the jaguar, that ancient symbol of power and ferocity, is a bundle of quarks and electrons, but what a bundle! It exhibits an enormous amount of complexity, the result of billions of years of biological evolution. What exactly does complexity mean, though, in this context and how did it arise? Such questions are typical of the ones this book tries to answer.
The remainder of the first part is devoted to the relationships among various concepts of simplicity and complexity, as well as to complex adaptive systems-those that learn or evolve in the way that living systems do. A child learning a language, bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics, and the human scientific enterprise are all discussed as examples of complex adaptive systems. The role of theory in science is discussed, as well as the issue of which sciences are more fundamental than others, along with the related question of what is meant by reductionism.
The second part deals with the fundamental laws of physics, those governing the cosmos and the elementary particles out of which all matter in the universe is composed. Here the quark comes into its own, as do superstrings, which for the first time in history offer the serious possibility of a unified theory of all the particles and forces of nature. The theory of the elementary particles is so abstract that many people find it difficult to follow even when explained, as it is here, without mathematics. Some readers may find it advisable to skim through portions of the second part, especially Chapters 11 (on the modern interpretation of quantum mechanics) and 13 (on the standard model of the elementary particles, including quarks). Skimming those chapters, or even the whole part, does not seriously interfere with following the remaining parts. It is ironic that a portion of the book intended to explain why fundamental physical theory is simple should nevertheless be difficult for many readers. Mea culpa! The second part concludes with a chapter on the arrow or arrows of time, culminating in a commentary on why more and more complex structures keep appearing, whether in complex adaptive systems like biological evolution or in nonadaptive systems like galaxies.
The third part takes up selection pressures operating in complex adaptive systems, especially in biological evolution, human creative thinking, critical and superstitious thinking, and some aspects (including economic ones) of the behavior of human societies. The approximate but convenient notions of fitness and fitness landscapes are introduced. In Chapter 20, 1 describe briefly the use of computers as complex adaptive systems, for instance to evolve strategies for playing games or to provide simplified simulations of natural complex adaptive systems.
The final part is rather different from the others, in that it is concerned mainly with policy matters rather than science and with advocacy as much as scholarship. Chapter 21 follows up the discussion in the earlier parts of the book about how the diversity of life on Earth represents information distilled over nearly four billion years of biological evolution, and how human cultural diversity has a similar relation to tens of thousands of years of cultural evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens. In Chapter 21, 1 argue that it is worth a great effort to preserve both biological and cultural diversity, and I take up some of the problems, paradoxes, and challenges involved. But it is not really possible to consider those issues in isolation. Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. Chapter 22 describes some efforts just getting under way to carry out such a crude study of world problems, including all the relevant aspects, not only environmental, demographic, and economic, but also social, political, military, diplomatic, and ideological. The object of the study is not just to speculate about the future, but to try to identify among the multiple possible future paths for the human race and the rest of the biosphere any reasonably probable ones that could lead to greater sustainability. Here the word sustainability is used in a broad sense, including not only the avoidance of environmental catastrophe, but of catastrophic war, widespread long-lasting tyranny, and other major evils as well.
In this volume the reader will find a great many references to the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), which I helped to found and where I now work, having taken early retirement from the California Institute of Technology, where I have become a professor emeritus after being a professor there for more than thirty-eight years. A good deal of the research done today on simplicity, complexity, and complex adaptive systems is carried out by members of the Institute or, more accurately, of the Institute family.
The word family is appropriate because SFI is a rather loose organization. The president, Edward Knapp, is assisted by two vice presidents and an office staff of about a dozen remarkably dedicated workers. There are only three professors, of whom I am one, all with five-year appointments. Everyone else is a visitor, staying for periods ranging from a day to a year. The visitors come from all over the world, and a number of them pay frequent visits. The Institute holds numerous workshops, lasting a few days or sometimes a week or two. In addition, several research networks have been organized on a variety of interdisciplinary topics. The far-flung members of each network communicate with one another by telephone, electronic mail, fax, and the occasional letter, and they meet from time to time in Santa Fe or sometimes elsewhere. They are experts in dozens of specialties, and they are all interested in collaborating across disciplinary boundaries. Each one has a home institution, where research can be carried out in a satisfactory manner, but each one also prizes the Santa Fe affiliation, which permits making connections that are somehow not so easy to make at home. Those home institutions may be great industrial research laboratories, universities, or national laboratories (especially the nearby one at Los Alamos, which has supplied so many brilliant and hard-working members of the Institute).
Those who study complex adaptive systems are beginning to find some general principles that underlie all such systems, and seeking out those principles requires intensive discussions and collaborations among specialists in a great many fields. Of course the careful and inspired study of each specialty remains as vital as ever. But integration of those specialties is urgently needed as well. Important contributions are made by the handful of scholars and scientists who are transforming themselves from specialists into students of simplicity and complexity or of complex adaptive systems in general.
Success in making that transition is often associated with a certain style of thought. The philosopher F. W. J. von Schelling introduced the distinction (made famous by Nietzsche) between "Apollonians," who favor logic, the analytical approach, and a dispassionate weighing of evidence, and "Dionysians," who lean more toward intuition, synthesis, and passion. These traits are sometimes described as correlating very roughly with emphasis on the use of the left and right brain respectively. But some of us seem to belong to another category: the "Odysseans," who combine the two predilections in their quest for connections among ideas. Such people often feel lonely in conventional institutions, but they find at SFI a particularly congenial environment.
The specialties represented at the Institute include mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, population biology, ecology, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, immunology, archaeology, linguistics, political science, economics, and history. SFI holds seminars and issues research reports on topics that include the spread of the AIDS epidemic, the waves of large-scale abandonment of prehistoric pueblos in the southwestern United States, the foraging strategies of ant colonies, whether money can be made by using the nonrandom aspects of price fluctuations in financial markets, what happens to ecological communities when an important species is removed, how to program computers to imitate biological evolution, and how quantum mechanics leads to the familiar world we see around us.
SFI is even cooperating with other organizations in the attempt, described in Chapter 22, to model ways in which human society on our planet might evolve toward more sustainable patterns of interaction with itself and with the rest of the biosphere Here especially we need to overcome the idea, so prevalent in both academic and bureaucratic circles, that the only work worth taking seriously is highly detailed research in a specialty. We need to celebrate the equally vital contribution of those who dare to take what I call "a crude look at the whole."
Although SFI is one of very few research centers in the world devoted exclusively to the study of simplicity and complexity across a wide variety of fields, it is by no means the only place or even the principal place-where important research is being carried out on the various topics involved. Many of the individual projects of the Institute have parallels elsewhere in the world, and in many cases the relevant research was begun earlier in other institutions, often even before SFI was founded in 1984. In some cases, those institutions are the home bases of key members of the SFI family.
I should like to apologize for what must seem like advertising for SFI, especially since the nature of the relationship between the Institute and other research and teaching organizations has been somewhat distorted in certain books published by science writers during the last few years. What amounts to a glorification of Santa Fe at the expense of other places has angered many of our colleagues at those places, especially in Europe. I am sorry if my book gives a similarly misleading impression. The reason for my emphasis on Santa Fe is merely that I am familiar with some of the work carried on here, or by scholars and scientists who visit here, and much less familiar with research, even prior research, carried out elsewhere.
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