explorations....

Using physics in a diagnostic way with our own and nature's systems as the patient

What's so different here? Systems Theory is not really the subject...
It's how to find better questions about individual physical systems & events
(using an empirical learning plan for discovering better questions about them),
how the particulars of distributed changes develop as flows, go through tipping points and accumulate improbable new realities, building local designs
in the spaces "between the laws of averages" where individuality develops.
It's a way to learn about how any persistent change in complex of relationships develops,
finding their natural basis, helping you make much better responses to them
during an age of our stumbling on ever bigger mistakes, untrustworthy advice, and having loads of back home work to catch up on.

....4/10/09 05/20 6/17 The problem is that people don't know much more than their values, metaphors and judgments, and natural change arises by itself through systems emerging from accumulating local changes everywhere at once. We can't follow what she does because we don't know how. What we need is a way to open our minds to nature's processes, as an alternative to our stumbling effort to make her follow ours.

A useful theory of environmental systems isn't about answers, but pointing to where you should look, only hinting at the answer you'll find there . It only began with noticing odd things like how all experiments misbehave a little, and how economies are designed to let everyone put money into the pot to take more out, with no end in sight... Along the way it takes discovering how to identify whole systems by connecting all the dots that grow together, like all the cells in a body and all the local features of the niche of material resources it grows in and arranges around itself.

People often respond "I don't understand", but that is neither a question, nor an answer. Your questions about your environment are needed for this to work. Try asking "what's happening" and explore, "looking around" at everything your issue touches to see it as a whole, or ask "where are the flows" or the "eruptions of change" that connect things! Natural systems doesn't make our kind of sense, true, so we need to learn theirs. If you get stuck break your thought pattern, try flipping a question around, to ask it in some entertaining backwards way, then retrace. The story here is about an exploratory physics of uncontrolled systems that any field or level of interest could make use of, discovering how to discover the naturally developing environmental relationships all around us. It's about "the track" that people often refer to with phrases like their life being "on track" or going "off track", and this approach lets you ask "whose track" and "what track". It allows open minded explorers to enrich their view and knowledge of the locally developing features of changing environments.

Natural environmental systems generally have "variable organization". Nature's physical systems are simply not sets of fixed rules, though having theoretical rules can help you make guesses and explore real systems. Physical systems develop from the collective behavior of independently acting and adapting parts, coming to act together as a whole, with '"the system" as their special environment. Organisms are that kind of special environment for their cells, as cultures are for their populations, storms are for their individual currents, and technologies for their many closely fitting complementary parts. All have the same basic organic design, lots of independently different working parts. You can recognize these wholes, and explore their internal relationships, using questions raised by watching their individual stages of development ¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸ as a whole. Any regular measure that reflects the whole will do, height or weight or consumption, displaying the basic turning points of a life and hinting at others.

Natural systems are illusive too, because people have lots of bad mental habits and tend to ask the wrong questions. We tend to speak of them as following our cultural values, which is a big mistake. We tend to mistake our own information for being the physical thing referred to. To "learn to think" then, step one might be to study how to separate your information from your questions about the realities beyond your information. How to do that seems to be to "start with step 2", recognizing how regularly accumulating separate events have continuities that identify them as parts of systems of nature you couldn't possibly have dreamed up. You learn to confidently point to them, and why it's not possible to define them. When you look inside a living organism you can never find what makes it alive, for example. That's because they're systems of distributed independently acting parts, and the "real action" at any moment is guaranteed to be somewhere other than where we look!

If that makes you say "cool!", you're on the way. Otherwise, "look around". One weakness of representing them with scientific models is that models don't have independently responding parts, so the models never represent any of the real working parts of their own subject matter. My approach uses a model of simple scientific questions anyone could ask, rather than predictions, presented as if anyone could be doing their own original scientific research, directly observing their own environment, relationships and experiences.

The main question is "What can you know for sure when you don't know very much?", and finding that the answer to that becomes a better leading question. Where it leads is to questions arising from the classic story line, "beginning to end", a unique common threads to be found in the history of "magical levitation" that sustains natural systems and their relationships. So this creates a story in your language as you use it to discover your questions. Sometimes it reveal surprising and helpful realities that have been 'hidden in sight', like where rules come from, and how they depend on local systems of relationships, or how information flows between scales of relationships. The key is learning to connect the continuity of changes in scale with resulting changes in kind with their irreversible stages of natural development. They help you see what kind of change is coming. The same basic phases and switches are what you look for in any system's history, and are often found to be identifiable as individual local developmental events.

Try just browsing for something interesting, there are lots of starting places...

If some one said "Local systems explore their environments for opportunities and develop individual organization and behavior" would you guess it meant a) natural systems all have conscious thoughts... b) they are ruled by spirits...
or c) they develop and respond individually along natural local paths ...?

The top systems issue in the world today?
The unwanted reverse effects of efficiency & productivity

Decreasing waste increases use.
04/15/09 05/20 Efficiency and productivity enhancements are the popular strategies for promoting sustainability, but generally have the opposite accumulative effect in fact because of how we use them. It's both a "micro" and "macro" effect, of what we do with the resources "saved". We spend them on something else! If you make cars that use half the gas, "pushing to the limits" then gives you twice the cars, and the same dependency on foreign oil! The problem is with the plan to push the limits, rather than hold back from them, because it actually ends up pushing all our interests into conflict! That's why so many of our interests are coming into conflict. Increasing the effectiveness of talents and techniques saves resources locally, but in our culture that is used to multiply what we do globally. That's the problem. Saving waste locally and ends up multiplying waste and complications globally. It's an even bigger problem that we're relying on it as our primary sustainability strategy, and won't be solved without thinking it all the way through.

In a growth environment having everyone become more productive and efficient is what promotes growth, as it always did. "Green design" is just improved technology with a new name. With the global plan to always push the limits no global relief of the limits results. Locally as you relieve pressure on one thing you remove constraints on using it. For a business, reducing unit costs is done in order to multiply the units produced, though, increasing rather than decreasing its total impact on the earth. That's what the curves all show, steadily improving technique with steadily multiplying impacts. One of those is improving our techniques for protecting human lives and welfare, that increase population and the growing spiraling cost of resources for supporting people in the style they would like.

We're not confronting the real moral questions with that, and have not been adding up the totals. Our desire to be ever more 'productive', defining "good" as "more", is exactly how we got in our present crisis of dependency on high consumption and multiplying impacts. What we need is a complete switch from being "takers" to becoming "healers", but it's tricky to understand how, so we need to think it through. It's NOT so much a question of reducing your 'waste'. It's finding a way to relieve the urge for growth rather than satisfy it. We need a change of purpose in how we spend the savings that efficiencies and productivity create, understanding true effects, to find choices with our intended effect.

Using efficiency for growth is likely a more urgent and larger hidden threat than global warming, actually, driving our overhead costs up and our remaining resource quality down, threatening a lasting collapse of our lifestyle, the opposite of our purpose. As our efficiency and productivity have improved it has been increasing our energy use nearly twice as fast. It's a profound error to think efficiencies in a growth system will reduce impacts, but it's nearly everyone's central sustainability plan.

How to tell if a particular efficiency has this rebound effect is partly whether it's profitable. The "macro rebound effect" occurs by saving one thing to remove bottlenecks to profitability in using other things, having the net effect of causing those other things to multiply. Efficiencies that save you money leave you more to spend on other things, so without cutting back you get to use more. The solution is to make sure the impacts of your uses have your intended effect, figuring out how to use your taking for healing. How to do it is a learning process we have yet to attend to, though, and starts with studying the problem and remembering details of the world we've been skipping over... Your effect on the system is your ripple effect on others, so your way to change the loops is by changing the opportunity and signals offered to others, not by controlling their choices. It's a different approach.

There are certainly positive aspects of simplicity too, and enjoying simple things is a natural part of healing, but to see how "pushing the limit" ends up multiplying conflict means going back to "book zero", and learning how the simplest growing things in nature manage the same problem with so little difficulty. It's the growth oriented things that are also responsive to their neighbors that pass around the very simple wisdom that responsiveness creates independence, showing you what is free to take and stay out of trouble.

For us the ripple effects of our money choices are global, not just on our neighbors, so it also means learning what happens to our money, where it comes from and goes to, so we can see what's free and avoid sending messages to take what will get us in trouble. Efficiencies also have the negative effects of 1) replacing our own ways of working that are like ecologies with ones like machines, 2) replacing nature's ecosystems with our mono-cultures and so sacrificing her own diversity, resilience, capacity to learn, adapt and innovate, while 4) increasing our dependence on using up things that are running out and so sacrificing our own resilience and adaptability to change too.

Which are themselves smaller scale networks containing their own Hives of activity

Cells on their own scale. that develop regularities as "Local Laws" of "Their Nature",

Linked together by sharing mediums of exchange with others, as part of larger scale networks,

Complex systems work by themselves, sometimes predictable, but determined by how their processes develop locally. There are two realities, the physical world and our mental world of human ideas, to be taken as dance partners rather than as enemies, denying neither their freedom, and avoiding the denial that is major trouble for both. At the scale of growth systems, at least, natural systems require diversity in their constituent parts and reserves of resources in their environments. Those that grow also come to require stability. Their creative hearts are the hives of network activity that form their cells, like the village that creates the reason for a train stop and the reason for the roads leading there. Those hives of activity on any scale are where creative events develop to propagate like seed on the larger network scales, the process of emerging features that for a whole system "punctuates the equilibrium".

Bob Ulanowicz has recently published a theorem on the need for diversity in natural systems (1) concluding "all complex systems, including our monetary and financial one, become structurally instable whenever efficiency is overemphasized at the expense of diversity and interconnectivity". What drives systems to overspecialize, though, and develop their strengths until they become weaknesses, is a broader issue. An example of this I’ve been studying is why people advocating sustainability are attracted to using efficiency as a growth resource, though that ultimately creates instability as its end. It appears that it used to have the opposite effect, and we got used to that. When we were small and the earth was big, growth stimulated by efficiency used to make resources more plentiful and cheaper. The economic theory of the last two centuries, then, built up around that assumption. Now the opposite is true, growth makes resources more scarce and expensive. If you look at the ‘green’ literature, these days, you find that fatal solution for sustainability (sadly...) is really all people talk about…

There are perhaps many misconceptions that lead our society to reduce diversity, for profit, till systems become unstable. I once devised a general solution to the monetary part of the problem I called “general allocation theory”. I found it hard to discuss with people. The barrier seemed to be the need to discuss economic systems as individual organisms of a sort, "creatura" as Gregory Bateson would have called them, like self-organizing social or business networks as well weather systems and organisms, each with their own individual behaviors. The still dominant "paradigm" of nature for science is that there are no independent systems, and everything that happens is determined by it's environment and error, so writing other better versions of that and other papers also received the same total lack of interest. The preference is for representing systems with a set of rules of control.

The natural systems approach is radically different in that systems are considered as individual self-organizations that originate by growth and development, and are full of different scales of independent internal activity, like what we observe. Links on a network, for example, exist to connect these ‘hives’ of complex system activity, like the road and rail networks that connect homes, towns and cities, or the blood stream branches that connect cells and organs. In economies there are the supply and product chains feeding into goods and service markets that link the individual hives of activity that individual businesses are. It's a really good "telescope", something you can reliably find your way with, providing a great way to begin making sense of natural systems by looking for their mediums of exchange of different scale, through which their hives of organization connect.

A Science of Natural Open Systems
-- Using the conservation of change to discover the divergent & convergent workings of change! --

05/08 05/08 05/08 07/20/08 9/17/08 The main question in science and philosophy has always been why so many things seem to have organization and behaviors of their own, appearing of local creative design as if having 'free will' where there seems to be no reason for it at all. It conflicts with our cultural heritage of belief in determinism, and so does more and more of what we're finding about the design of actual physical things and processes My work is about having found an efficient way to watch closely as things exhibit that behavior. In the end I think it both elevates the meaning and importance of the ordinary as well as of the human drama. As Stuart Kauffman recently observed, the clear appearance is that our familiar view of the ordinary is truly impoverished. We have much to learn.

I've had the very unusual privilege of finding a fascinating large gap in the scientific method and an intriguing good way to fill it. It points toward returning science to being a general purpose tool for anyone with curiosity, a general craft rather than a single specialty. [For the layman, 'conservation' refers to properties that are sustained, it's what makes adding and subtracting them work, and so all of science. This is then about solving the riddle of how that conserved change in nature comes and goes.] Natural systems producing conserved change can be identified by the emergence of continuity in their development, i.e. periods with observable derivative rates of change .

That evidence can be found in the development of most observable events, and in all natural and man made economic systems. The main trick is that the continuities in natural systems move around, so wherever you look they seem intermittent. Putting together how emerging processes develop starts with observing conserved change.

What you find, even when outcomes are predictable, is that much less is strictly pre-determined than you might think. The development of individual events and systems follows a path of local development in the local environment. Watching closely how it happens can help inform our models. It can not be modeled itself because it is local organizational development involving many independently reacting parts, a learning process. Inter-dependent controls can't emulate inter-dependent discoveries. Events can be seen to emerge from local growth processes starting from a 'seed' of original opportunity and design.

What develops is a conserved 'little bang' of explosive change, that points to the network of relationships that is emerging. You can watch them as they find their own paths,... and then run into each other. It's an organization making rather than organization following process. The basic technique is to look for the beginning and end of continuities of change, and look closer to what connects them. Continuities of change identify local systems that "connect the dots". Browse around and think about emergent events in your own world, then write with good questions. pfh

Modern science developed around the model of physics, containing a major limitation: physics did not include a method for studying individual events. Individual events turn out to have original individual development paths that confound traditional formulas and statistical description. To represent them physics would need to represent their environments, before those environments are explored. Unable to represent environments either before or after they are explored, the traditional physics method uses only the statistical variation for collections different individual events to represent their environments as an uncertain boundary condition constant.

Environments, though, are neither uncertain nor constant, but very definite and changing. This is a big gap to fill, so I developed a new physics of change to fill the gap by asking a different kind of question, creating a way to study individual events as a learning process for what people are directly observing. In just the same way as traditional physics you take the learning process to a point of diminishing returns, just following a new kind of question and producing a new kind of highly useful result. The main problem has not been a lack of data. It's been that we ask the wrong kinds of questions about the plentiful kinds of naturally available data.

The largest benefit comes when you can recognize in events or systems an accumulative development, design or learning processes. For physics, that means that some novel local feature is being 'conserved', the conservation laws locally apply, and you can define meaningful derivative rates of change. For engineering and design, it directs your attention to the path-finding behavior that records an accumulative 'exploration' of environmental opportunities and the paths that connect them. For philosophers, it indicates where there is a world beyond the world known to any individual. Representing what is known omits the process of exploring the unknown by which the known was discovered, representing how we open our minds seemingly only to close them more tightly. Environments and natural systems could be represented another way, with keys to asking the right questions as you explore them...

System development is like a storm that draws 'energy' from where it is found. Wherever new paths are developing, a model of the past directions taken will not show the paths to be taken in the future, but could be read to look for them. There turn out to be various long range forecasting signs to help, but if you just learn to ask the right questions, and watch closely, you'll see the new directions being taken much sooner than someone that does not. You start from common informal impressions of change, in commonly observable physical, social or emotional systems, and using your own careful learning to develop a sensitive navigation instrument.

Accumulative original path-making seems to be part of nearly all individual events of interest, and so common experience already gives us a lot of (perhaps disorganized) knowledge about them. What I developed is a systematic way of asking better questions about how independent systems develop their own learning paths. You can potentially use it to combine some of your own large store of common knowledge and direct observation to become much more meaningful. Some of the key questions are very general, but their long range forecasting potential is huge. The four basic questions are to a) what observations suggest 'arrows' of change? b) how are the directions they point changing? c) what processes are doing that and what paths are they finding in the environment in which they're moving?, and d) what will they run into and how will that change them?

Common experience gives us lots of usable models for this, once you get the idea of watching nature's learning paths at work! [Theoretical note: A 'model' is a 'metaphor', a mental construct to help stimulate the imagination for ways to directly engage with the world. Scientific models get their value not from being the same as natural processes, but as 'metaphors' for nature that engineers and designers use in the process of directly learning how to make and do things. Models are nothing at all without the people using them to for relating to things beyond explanation. They're 'guides'.]

There start is to use some simple examples of natural systems as a model. I seem always far behind on my edits, but my 'bump on a curve' method discusses a few that can be generalized to help you learn about all natural systems. 'Generalizing' them provides places for ordinary observations to plug in and then begin to track the paths a whole system and its learning process are following. One kind we all pay great attention to is watching the learning paths that new personal relationships take. It starts at our first contact with a new friend or new relationship at work and we naturally look for the 'arrows' that point where it might go. 'Arrows' are changes that point to a direction of change, like how readily they respond, or if the kinds of responses branch out or not.

If those arrows start small and change by steadily bigger steps, then you might say the relationship is 'taking off'. This gives a very concrete meaning to build on the general sense of what 'taking off' means informally. Then you begin seeing how the other person's responses and the relationship's directions reflect things being discovered in the environment through which the relationship is making its path. That's a major step, toward having it become 'real' and participate in the world.

Then there are hazards, like not watching as the relationship alters its own environment, or something else does, and you're not ready to be responsive when you need to be.., or then unable to understand what happened. If successful, relationships go from 'start' through 'take off' to 'integration', if they avoid embarrassing failure along the way. For each learning process as a whole the development always goes from first beginning to complete end, and always experiences the four basic changes in direction, in one or another form. ¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸ This way of organizing the historical progression of personal relationship issues is just one good way to start thinking of about natural systems as complex relationships that follow a learning process.

This can be defined in rigorous scientific terms or left informal, applied to help understand familiar short or long term learning experiences, as well as ones that take a thousand years to develop like a civilization or a few nanoseconds like the plasma cascade that forms the learning path of a spark or lightning. All development paths start with an explosion by a process that is then altered by what that explosion runs into. pfh

5/16/07..09/08/07 02/19/08 Also Known As..
a Natural Systems Theory, a General Behavioral Economics,
a Unified Physics of Open Systems

It turns out that when you distinguish individual 'physical events' from individual 'information events' your attention switches between theory and process. Theory is located in our minds and process in the physical world our theories grapple with. When you study that difference, you discover that physics is based on describing controlled variables in closed systems, while physical processes emerge within their own open environments with significant degrees of independent local design and behavior. In short, when studying the uncontrolled physical process systems that we are immersed in, it is very useful to use physics backwards, as a learning tool for opportunistic systems in addition to using it as a descriptive tool for deterministic systems. Deterministic systems are not what give us our big or our most interesting problems in relating to the world.

As I progress with finding better words for explaining how to make this insight useful I update this site. I'm way behind, though, so you should browse for what you find interesting rather than what it appears I find interesting. To begin to identify where natural systems are, I use a method of watching how they develop. That leads to exploring their own individual emerging internal networks of relationships (the Physics of Happening). With the 'emergence' of sustainability science, all the separate sciences are having to shift their explanatory paradigms to functionally connect with each other and the world's stakeholder communities for the business of making the earth sustainable.

A physical process understanding, recognizing the significantly independent design and behavior of individual natural systems and system events, seems like an obvious starting point. The learning processes I've developed for that, and have tried to outline here, will hopefully improve and be found useful for that. We're describing a 'big hill' to climb here, but if you look beyond the climb to where we're really headed it helps a lot. Oh, and of course, looking 'over the hill' also helps identify the plans for climbing ever steeper hills we seem to have so many of that we urgently need to change!

Finding that your community's 'sacred' truth is flawed is a mixed blessing, of course. On the plus side, people do leave you to work as you want. That's not the intent, but it does have benefits. The scientific problem is to find how to study the deep physics of natural systems from observing individual events, rather than observing large statistical classes of events. Science has traditionally only done the latter. Documenting the various 'tricks' for making the opposite approach work is an ongoing effort.

One of them is studying individual events in relation to simple models, but looking for the discrepancy rather than the fit. Another is looking for continuities emerging from the noise and reading their sequence and markers (¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸). What you find is an evolution of individual complex system events that turns out to look surprisingly natural, of course, but also very different, and a break from representing nature with fixed statistical models. You find many useful new principles for how the local animation of natural system events develops, and how to expand ones own choices.

There are several other fields of science making good progress on the subject in their areas, systems process ecology, evolutionary development biology, self-organizing control systems engineering, and perhaps others I'm unaware of. A significant new field of physics, network science, seems particularly successful, studying both theoretical networks and real ones embedded in natural systems. The networks isolated from real physical systems, and their topology, are unusually helpful in exploring the larger complex systems in which they are embedded. When you consider the role of 'nodes' in the larger complex system it appears they are typically also 'hives' of, 'grass roots' activity in the larger system.

That helps you think about the relation between networks and the several other kinds of connection they rely on, and the developmental processes that animate them. There's a good ways to go, but I think the new outside-in view of the units of natural organization (that has been mine) and the new inside-out view of the same (Net Sci) will connect. My Chapters model for the timeline of natural system events (from the 'Bump on a Curve' ¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸ Notepad ) shows how one piece of network science fits with my general sequence of evolutionary events and my PICS model discusses it a little further.

That all observable events display the locally evolving workings of complex systems (there's nothing else there) essentially means time is not a location on a scale, but an ongoing universal distributed process. Add to that the observation that some things begin and end, makes the starting point for the new physics of nature as I approach it. Consequently all local events individually evolve, and so looking at them as if they occurred in large collections of identical events, with the discrepancies explained away as 'noise', hides how they individually work. The differences between events help show how they individually develop and ignoring the differences hides how they develop. Historically, science has relied on a statistical model of nature, and actually missed that the coherence of individual events was being erased by the design of the established method of studying them!

It takes some effort, but learning how to scientifically study individual events (as opposed to whole classes of events) does let you in on some of the secrets of the things in life that actually matter to you. Where it begins to yield new secrets of the nature of events is using it to read emerging complex networks. Growth exposes the things composed of loops of relationships that constitute the insides of natural systems. Where I started is with the curiously obvious simple idea that if things were too complex to collect good data, you could learn how a local process worked by watching carefully. That's using the world to imprint directly on your mind.

Why that is rejected by so many scientists is a real mystery, just learning by unbiased observation. How to do it is a little tricky perhaps, as it means becoming a good direct observer, to watch what is being invented right were you see it, rather than imagining it as being determined by some myth or formula or something else. What seems clear is that when this and the other co-evolving work on the subject link together, it will change the meaning of science and nature, enlarging science to include a general study of locally evolving events, .... of what's happening!

One trick to keep from getting confused is to remember that any new understanding of nature is of real things we've been living with all along. It's also very reasonable to be cautious about unexpected riches, adapting a friend's metaphor, as when a search for 'needles in a haystack' unexpectedly turns out to find the whole haystack made of needles. You find different things when you ask different questions, and finding a global change in the appearance of the physical world, in this case, should be kept in perspective. The way to see individual behavior is not to give up your ideal of things following rules. It's to hold your idea of things following common behaviors and also watch the discrepancies observed in individual events.

Usually models have been used to represent and replace nature, explaining the individual differences as 'noise' and the model as what is real. I experimented with looking through models backwards, essentially, looking through them as an aid to directly observing the real-time individual behaviors of nature themselves. Just nuts, huh?, well, ...but also highly productive!

People often take special note of the large apparent significance of circumstantial events, the 'butterfly effect', etc. What's easily overlooked is that these are events that the environment responds to with large changes, and that it's the environment that is doing all the work of producing the big effect. No doubt some individual causes have great individual influence. Quite often the hidden 'ripe circumstance', that was quite invisible up to that point, clearly had the larger part of cause. It's not that it's not relevant to consider individual external events, it's that the path of learning about what causes them to have effect is elsewhere. There's also the strange feature of systems you could call 'causation from all over'. This is often called 'heterarchy'.

What explains what overcomes the impossibility of running a sensible world with either deterministic 'butterflies' or 'causes from all over' is that natural systems succeed by being opportunistic not deterministic. Natural systems 'explore' their worlds and go where they find openings. That's only slightly stretches the language, and is what I observe as best fitting the evidence, keeping a simple model in hand and carefully watching the discrepancies. The deep model I use as my own reference and exploratory guide is organizational continuity. It takes a process to change. It's a really wonderful tool for reading the meaning of events, pointing out where change is developing, or where change is missing, what kind of evolving process networks to look for.

Of course, we all make mistakes.... and I'm not immune, but I also see some big ones being made. The truth is that bad news is the very best kind of news you can possibly get, if it comes in time. The compensation is partly that nature never leaves a careful observer without a silver lining. Steering a course in nature is partly a matter of looking out for the really really bad news. When you get the knack you find it's not only much safer, but also lots of fun.

Take the hope of protecting the future of the earth with 'sustainable design' for economic development, and technology and lifestyle changes to mitigate global warming. You'd think these world wide efforts would be well thought out by someone, wouldn't you? Asking the right question, though, makes it's fairly easy to prove that the broad consensus approach to these very laudable goals provides only temporary symptomatic relief and will make the underlying problem we have far worse. They're both plans to relieve symptoms and let the underlying problem to continue to multiply, i.e. our multiplying exploitation of the earth.

Growth is a creative learning process of a whole system. Learning is always a challenge to overcome complexity that either stabilizes or destabilizes. If a teacher gives out more and more homework until the students go completely mad, it's not helping them learn. That's what we're in the process of doing to ourselves with our plan for endless economic growth. Understanding the multiplying impacts of economic growth and the complex responses of environments, then inventing how to adapt to them, and coordinate our responses, are all necessarily parts of the contract. The 'genius in the back row' says 'how about we have less homework instead of more'.

Once the indispensable technologies beginning to approach their limits and the impacts of hitting the limits begins to multiply, the complexity of accommodating change multiplies too, as the coordination of responses also becomes increasingly urgent, conflicted and delayed. The central reason is the old tricks stop working, because as you begin to rely on efficiencies they develop more and more slowly, not more and more rapidly. That's both a valid interpretation of thermodynamics for natural systems and what's observably happening.

The error in the new effort to save the earth and while accommodating continual economic growth is that just as the whole system is turning to rely on efficiencies to reduce our impacts on the earth's natural systems, they're inherently running out. It may not be predictable when that would lead to mass confusion and failure, but it's certain that it would. Our ignorance of just where we'd loose control of responding to the multiplying impacts of growth is not made any safer by the fact that rushing at the limits without knowing where they are is just what we've been doing all along, of course, even if in the past we seemed to get away with it! Growth systems either stabilize or destabilize, a simple direct new understanding coming from recognizing growth events as local learning processes of individual natural network systems. A growth system, like modern civilization, may choose when but not whether to change, and that begins a very interesting new kind of discussion.

Concept & Comment: .....little essays (see my blog for lots of nice littler ones)

Odd Notes & Facts

- 06/09 How nature builds things is generally illogical because building up physical system connections uses complementary parts that link through their differences, unlike how logic connects through equalities. As for building a house, neither foundation or roof look at all like a place to live, though they're start and end to making one.
- 06/09 What we perceive is a simple culturally reinterpreted mental image of physical things being looked at of quite different kinds and much greater complexity, explorable but not fully comprehendible in any part.
- 06/09 Models that imply approaching instability mark systems that won't continue, and times when new form will emerge.
- 06/09 Being constructive a matter of logic, but using complementary things that make different sense to link into wholes. Foundations can't be lived in and look NOTHING like a house, nor does a roof or even walls really, but a house without them is unlivable.
- 02/09 A telescope may not look much like a universe...{but lets you see one)
- 10/08 Environmental systems don't follow the past but diverge from the present, on continuous branching paths of accumulative change (making ways to watch where they're going and see the complications they're running into)
- 7/08 If you find yourself having to fix ever bigger problems, you're fixing the wrong problem... (and the real solutions maybe just look ridiculous)
- 5/08 A main issue now is how the parts of growth systems as they run into natural limits all run into each other, in conflict - 2/08 All kinds of natural systems are little worlds, having internal design and behavior of their own
- 7/08 "The media" refers to form of conversation that seeks the "passionate assertion of the opposing point of view" for entertainment, not any form of successive exploration and validation of anything.
- 2/08 If you see as pattern of continuous divergence, there's there's a little multiplier inside.. and then you need to decide if you should try to: a) turn it off, b) get out of it's way, or c) let it go to it's own level of comfort to become a partner in your world.
- 2/08 Absorbing CO2 produced by average spending w/ trees, add ~1acre of mature forest per $150,000

a Physics for Open Systems

Bump on a Curve ¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸ Notepad For Dummies
for non-scientists who happen to watch what goes on 4/07
Observing Systems
a new reaching summary, in 22 short subjects -from the view of 6/06
Physics of Happening... ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸ physics research & applications
analytical technique, theory & tools for research on natural systems as events

Introductions

The Art of Observation
Natural Systems & Emerging Events
Network Science, General Systems, Natural Economics & growth
Microclimates
Publication
Other people & Influences
(an unhidden pattern of events & other writings)

The Art of Observation

12/28/08 1/24/09 1/27 There are two things required for learning how things in nature work on their own. One is observing them without thinking, so your mind records some marks of the original behavior in a highly faithful way. The second is finding a way of connecting them that raises useful questions for further observation. One way to tell if it's working is whether you find paths of discovery that lead you on, taking you beyond your imagining. That helps you tell if you're making things up or finding them, an endless hazard. Observation is pure fundamental scientific research. Then, you hope your way of asking better questions gives you a way to talk to others who have done the same thing, in their own different way.

Figure: The diagram is of 1) how seeing a tree leaves a direct imprint on the retina of an observer's eye, 2) in who invents in their mind an image of a whole system through which energy and materials flow like a tree, along with an image of how it is connected in the cycles of nature. Is the diagram to be found anywhere in nature? No, of course not. It's imaginary.. Is it may also be useful for helping the observer ask better questions about the real tree and it's environment, that others may understand as well. Possibly... --

Why people seem to know so very little about how the intricately organized things of nature take care of themselves gives the appearance that humans have not learned much from our time watching to see how things around us work. Our normal rule for explanations is self-consistency, that every piece of information is determined by some other piece of information, and nothing in it has any independent behavior. The better question would be, if some things in the world seem controlled like that, why isn't everything? Asked another way, it might be, why do people almost never ask that question? That there do indeed seem to be at least some things that take care of themselves, but we hardly ever ask how, seems to be a possible reason why we have such mixed success in taking care of ourselves... It comes down to our habit of treating the *things* we see as the *information* we have about them. Things may actually talk back, and information never will. Seeing them as information we then interpret the things of the natural world in terms of our explanations. The inadequacy of that is not only how explanations are never going to talk back, and the things being explained very well could. All the connections in an explanation are also things we added ourselves, not things that came from what we're explaining. What we use to connect the pieces of information to make explanations stick together are the cultural and emotional values we attach to the information. In our minds we don't see physical things as connected by the physical systems they are composed of, but by the value laden constructs we attach to the information we have in our minds. We tend to equate the real world with a kind of "dream world", our own artificial representation of it. How we see things as being organized is as we organize our own thoughts and values. We don't see them as organized by the natural processes that produced what we see. What a true observer needs to overcome is this naturally artificial naive viewpoint, that the things of the world are the images we have of them. It's often not easy, but there are lots of little flaws in the 'magic' of how we disguise the world as information you can learn to trust, leaving openings to the real world where you discover connections rather than fill in explanations.

Observing is a process of letting the intricate beauties and designs of nature seep into one's awareness without imposing your own cultural values or explanations on them, to remain free to discovering their own connections. When later attaching ones own values to them, then it is to something of substance rather than to nothing of substance. Otherwise observation tends to be just a fascination with your own values. Often where you make your first discoveries of nature's connections is noticing how things act as a "whole". It's the best indication of the existence and design of uncontrolled systems, that they have complex scattered connections that act as one. The easiest place to see it is in any organism, or culture, or burst of chemical energy, locating the system by how its set of scattered parts erupts in growth as one. What you soon find is that what makes them whole, and gives them their ability to act as one, is what I call "ESP" (equal stress principle). Things that act as a whole tend to evenly distribute their own stresses internally. Seeing this can be easy for some things, but quite hard particularly for things we only know from other people's explanations. Explanations don't do well with uncontrolled parts. It can be a lot easier with things that need no explanation or come naturally and are beyond explanation, that we know intimately and so can closely observe without bias. Truthful observation is not a "one shot deal" but an accumulation of them. It's like building compost in the soil of an organic garden. It's a matter of letting one's own mind accumulate a rich compost of the unaltered features imported directly from the "value free" physical systems of nature, letting your mind become imprinted by them as the first step.

A painter needs paint, and a good observer needs to let their 'paints' accumulate in nature's own colors. Not taking that approach, but seeing things as the information about them we connect in our own subjective way, our observations then tend to represent the world as lifeless and formless. Things become "just explanations", given meaning only by the values we attach to them. We miss all the natural meanings they have that way. What we then "see" is our own poor awareness of how other things work on their own. Then in everything we see we find mainly reflections of ourselves and little of the natural world's own connections. It's an 'inadequate' view of our extraordinary rich intertwined and living world with its many kinds and scales of organized and complex individual parts. Whether it's the health and prosperity of a tree, of a storm the size of a planet, or of a personal friendship or community of relationships getting into trouble and painfully hard to understand, the beginning of becoming truly a part of it's future is truthful observation.

I have lots of accumulated notes on observation technique scattered all over these pages. I've been learning how to express it better, which of course means nearly everything here is also a little "out of date" and in need of "fixing" a little. So, poke around...and see what you'd use and what you'd fix.

Observing Systems - 2006 collection of 23 very short essays
Bump on a Curve Notepad - 2007/08 watching how things develop their own bump on the curve
Stories & Experiences - blog entry category

Natural Systems, Complex Learning for Distributed Processes

...Using physics tools a naturalist, for studying individual systems, their internal networks, life histories and their current and future learning processes. 05? 07/04/06 5/26/07 2/2/08 3/3/08

1/29/09 Note: My first successful expression of this idea was an old unpublished early paper called "An Unhidden Pattern of Events", also described by Stan Salthe as the "canonical development trajectory" in thermodynamic and informational change, in his 2005 Energy and Semiotics. The common pattern is an outline, or a 'crib sheet' if you will, on the "Chapters - In the whole story of individual lives and events" that individual evolutions and events themselves fill out with all their details. The above reflects our having recently combined and coordinated some of our lists of features, that I have used to expand one of my old condensed versions, Chapters08.

11/08/08 1/6/09 The general subjects of dissipative systems and complexity is are not really new, and really vast. What's new here is the recognition that individual systems that begin and end do not need to be approximated by deterministic models in order to explore their changing local organization and developmental behaviors. Determinism is a restrictive assumption of the physical sciences, based apparently on the guess that because some things can be determined from other things, therefore nothing has independent learning or behavior. This is about learning how to study systems with clearly independent learning and behavior as a naturalist would, but using the tools of physics to identify the learning processes of the complex systems they contain and are the environments they interact with.

The starting point is that the conservation laws seem to imply that processes need to have multiple scales of developmental organization for energy flows to begin or end. That conclusion comes from the old problem that when theory implies infinite field density, rates of energy flow or accelerations, the real implication is of another scale of organization. A theorem expands the conservation laws into a general law of continuity and divergence that identifies natural necessities and limits of developmental processes, and opens a new way to explore causation.

To apply the continuity & divergence principle to complex systems research one uses the principle backwards from the normal procedures of physics. It becomes a diagnostic tool for exploratory learning, that helps locate and identify the 'little bangs' and 'big booms' of locally emergent developmental processes. Development in a process, say an ionization cascade in a spark or other growth phenomenon is called 'learning' because it is not guided by rules or a map, but takes place by local exploratory interaction with an environment. That successes in that tend to be exposed by how they multiply provides a guide to where successful strategies within the system are developing. It leads to a diagnostic approach to physical systems and change rather than a representational approach. Work on the method was begun in the late 1970's and now is collected here, with methods and applications discussed in "the physics of happening" section.

From an information theory view, a diagnostic approach to physics treats the physical system as a unique individual "in-physico" model of itself... The empirical signs of organizational change point to the physical phenomena within and around it, which are together considered to be the full complete and true representation of the system, in the physical thing itself. Then one explores it's features and shapes to inform one's questions about it. A 'theory' that may develop for it is considered to fit the physical thing's shapes like 'a glove' fits (or does not fit) to 'a hand'. It's an approach of trying to understand individual things that nature has already built, by developing better questions about the process by which they developed. It then leads to questions about what new conditions it will confront and need to respond to as it develops further. The conserved property of derivative continuity allows one to do that by connecting inflection points in its learning curves with the internal network of its system of relationships, their learning processes, and the environment they are responding to.

Typically there is a switch in the kind of development between a starting period of discovering expanding opportunity for self-referencing change in relation to the conditions the emerging system is coming from, without limits, to responding to and integrating with the limits of a larger environment it is emerging into. The system development alters its original conditions of development and other independent things in the environment often independently respond.

Network Science
....what happens when things connect! 05/24/07.. 09/09/07

Watch this space.... The NetSci conference in NY in May 07. The ability to convey highly complex system information and understand the evolution of systems from it is advancing to a useful tool very rapidly. Great Displays from Manuel Lima's Visual Complexity. My most recent technical notes on linking Net Sci and Natural Systems theory with Complex Systems engineering.. PICS.htm

One of the things that causes the 'power law' distribution of organization in emergent systems appears to be the elaboration and refinement that occurs in how they grow and develop.
One of the ways of understanding how networks are embedded into the complex systems which produce them is hat all the nodes are actually 'hives' of activity in the larger system when looked at at a different scale.
To understand what it means that people are connected by 5 degrees of separation and web pages by 19 is helps to consider how close connection of this kind has a simultaneous reverse property of great isolation and independence. What the difference between 5 and 19 means is that information is divided into many many more separate worlds, the flip side of the astonishment we all feel when finding out that all our very separate worlds are also quite closely connected.

The tools for displaying these structures and relationships are so good, and the complex system decisions people need to make so pressing, that there clearly should be an office of complex information display in every branch of government. You can't ask the question till you can see the problem. Think of the difference if we could look at comprehendible maps of the real evolving complex relations between communities in Iraq or your own city! It's clearly possible now. Think of the difference if we could map ecologies in depth and display their connections in a visually compelling and analytically rigorous way. It's clearly possible now.

General Systems Theory
....a grand event in systems thinking that didn't survive, 05? 07/04/06

General Systems Theory, was one of several great attempts to make a science of the study of natural systems. The more popular but still unproven one today goes by the name 'Complexity'. GST originated as a major interdisciplinary effort in the 1940's, Von Bertalanffy, Boulding, Ashby, Miller, Forrester and others, and seemed to loose direction and turn into other things in the late 1980's & 90's. The language of general systems theory as it developed, is problematic as science and quite short on generally useful results. Still, it is full of insights into the nature of the problem.

The successor organization which retains little of the original form keeps a web site with a genealogy diagram of systems thinking (http://www.iigss.net/gPICT.pdf). Basically, 'holism' became 'cybernetics' and with several layers of complexity became 'general systems theory'. I've had recent long and productive correspondence with Don McNeil about the origins and 'death' of pure systems thinking, and what might be salvageable. I thought it might be of some research interest sometime, and asked if I put it up on the web that I show it as copy righted. My two 1985 papers for SGSR and some other things are now online too.

All natural systems are an interplay between active and passive components, for example. There's the plant and the soil, the cell and the blood stream, the speaker and listener, the industry and the pools of resources from which it draws and to which it contributes. Nature is also structured as a unity of opposites, things and the mediums through which they communicate with each other, for one example. These and many other insights into nature are mystical in their power, but also overwhelming in their grandeur while failing the test of having practical use. It left those who studied it relatively less to say than it first appeared they would have.

The 'physics of happening' is a general science of systems based on close empirical study of the same physical subjects as GST. I did a quick study of the GST citation rates for the terms 'general systems' and 'general systems theory' on Google Scholar from the 1930's to the present. The measures show a combination of effects, but tell an interesting story. There's been a continued explosion of the use of GS and a hint of climax and decline in the original use of GST. It's just a very fast stucy I haven't been able to follow up. ed 6/23/06

Natural System Economies - compulsive capitalism v. natural growth
...(it's about what you do with profits!) 05? 07/04/06 08/25/08

Nature's Table - A simple sketch the economy as a natural system 5/30/09

The normal way to multiply wealth is to invest in something that makes a profit and add the profit to your investments so both your investments and profits multiply exponentially. That's the familiar compound investment function of using something that was built to build more, using success to leverage growing success. Every organized system in nature actually begins with a relatively 'long habit' of doing that, but then changes. The change happens at a point of diminishing returns, a declining net productivity for investment (declining success in multiplying) at some point. What businessmen normally do when that happens in a single business is divert the returns for the business away from reinvestment, doing something else with them. It turns their business into a sustainable "cash cow" to support other interests or help build compounding investment in other things.

When diminishing returns occur for an economy as a whole its seen as meeting natural resistance, in steeper learning curves, shortages causing higher prices and erupting internal and external conflicts, throughout the whole system at once. Nature is sending the same signal for the system as a whole that peak development in an individual business indicates, that increasing investment is decreasingly productive. It then decreases the productivity of investment to continue multiplying investment, heading toward a point of whole system climax where the productivity of investment comes to zero. It could not get there, of course, since zero return financial systems would not be stable.

To maximize the natural capital and its positive rate of returns would then result from investment returns being diverted and freely spent on non-investment interests, treating the economy as a whole as a "cash cow". Stabilizing that way leaves an ample pool of investment to maintain or update outmoded parts of the economy, while maximizing rates of return and dispersing wealth to extend prosperity throughout the whole system. As for a single business, it's just responding to the environmental signal in the way providing the best total return.

Why that strategy does work for natural systems and does not work for people is that people continue multiplying their own investments as the whole system runs into resistance. The resulting zero sum game at the end of growth then becomes an accumulation of conflicts more than an accumulation of wealth. The technical solution J M Keynes called "the widow's cruse" is for those with surplus funds to spend them as they would with the proceeds of a cash cow business. How to organize it is less clear, but the requirement is quite clear. It would also have the unusual effect of decentralizing wealth as part of the whole system response to approaching sustainable climax.

What you see now is the opposite in terms of our "natural capital". As the net productivity of investment in the earth (new wealth minus new impacts) decreases, the concentration of wealth has been increasing too. That is the opposite effect of making the opposite response. Ending growth by maximizing total returns then, creates an economy that is stable, vibrant and changing, at the beginning of a long a productive life of stability, just not exploding. When you look at successful organisms throughout nature they all make that same discovery, that the turning point from growth toward stability is the beginning, not the end of 'the good life'.

There are a great many 'relief valves' for the forces and pressures in our economic system, and it once had a marvelous stability. Our great wealth comes from the interaction of a lot of talented people trying to make things work, connecting with each other through free open markets. There are dangers, though, in pushing it too far. Relying on ever more complex ways to accelerate the use of diminishing resources, robbing them from people who can't keep up and otherwise pushing everyone's interests into conflict, creates instability that is irreversible except by collapse. Expectations for growing financial returns from diminishing physical returns are guaranteed to be disappointed. You get cascading failures of expectation.

Just following "productivity growth" to it's logical end amounts to making ever bigger decisions about the future ever faster, leading to a certainty of making ever bigger and longer lasting mistakes. You can see them growing all around us, like global warming. The hurried 'solutions' contain many of the same mistakes too, like offering 'alternative' resources to only find them just used to continually leverage all others, repeating the same 'fault' being blamed on fossil fuels. Why people don't openly wonder if we're making some mistake, given nearly everyone's good will and the dramatic evidence we're making the problem worse is a puzzle. It's clearly that multiplying our solutions is multiplying our problems, though, once you ask.

It is in the nature of exponential growth to bring about the unforeseen, of ever larger scale, at an ever faster pace. Growth for us has been very rewarding for around 600 hundred years. Slow accumulation, using success to build on success over the long haul, has produced a very dramatic change in the promise of human history. Past performance, as they say, is no guarantee of future returns though. That's especially the case in humanity's clear diminishing net returns on investing in the earth. The benefit/cost ratio is simply not what it was. In order for the economy to climax the amount of investment needs to climax. That's possible either at a healthy high level or after collapsing and returning human culture to a new era of feudalism. It only depends on how persistent we are at compounding our errors.

There are a variety of other possibilities, but those two are the achievable extremes. There are also other issues we need to think all the way through, like population and entitlements, all the bad habits of being a successful small organism with apparently unlimited resources. The financial system correction would have investors 'spend' their 'unearned income' so that their investments didn't multiply, relying on savings from earned income to maintain the investment pool. It would be come self-reinforcing as investors recognized anyone who 'cheated' to get ahead of them as a cheater. You could call it a change in the "prudent man rule".

Some significant community of investors would only need to change their own personal habits that way, and object to doing business with others who didn't. -- A basic model of money flow that describes the choices for financial growth on a finite planet is discussed in General Allocation Theory. An further description of the dimensions of the problem and solution are in The One real option.. natural climax and the science of natural economies as learning systems Hidden Life. 6/23/06 9/10/06 08/26/08

Microclimates

Air Current Networks. The origin of my work on scientific methods and natural systems of change was a careful study of evolving air current patterns in buildings, originally begun as a research in building climate and architectural design. It led to discovering a large number of unusual undocumented air current structures and patterns, and the simple observation that air flow is an amazing designer of new forms in profuse variety with clearly no directing formulas involved, all in the complete absence of 'noise' and entirely out of control. Natural air currents in confined spaces are constantly evolving complex history-dependent structures beginning with growth, "with nothing there but molecules".

Invention. One of the unusual air current structures observed has the effect of eliminating turbulence near a surface where turbulence would otherwise normally develop, potentially improving the efficiency of heat exchangers. The portion of a working fluid having made contact with the heat transfer surface can be extracted without allowing it to mix with the unheated portions. Some of my work on patents using this trick is available. If you're at all interested you should speak with me and possibly use me as a consultant, to make sure you understand the particulars necessary for making it work.

Personal Bio

03/08 - This nice old sketch is from the late 70's, when I was doing my early work on identifying uncontrolled systems. I've changed some, but not a whole lot really. I was born and raised in Hamilton NY, a small college town in central New York hill country. My dad was the head of the Colgate physics department. Physics wasn't considered fit conversation at dinner, that was family time, but he and I spent endless hours working on things in his lab or our shop at home and talking about how the world worked. The rest of the time it seems I was out with my friends playing in and around the creek that ran through the field behind our house. I think my favorite place of all time was the clump of big old willow trees along the creek called Fallen Timbers, where the old trunks had leaned over on each other to form various ladders and bridges on which my friends and I could play Robin Hood or Peter Pan.

Well, that was many years ago, and my son Jonathan is now 20 and in college. It seems my easiest duty and greatest pleasure is to give him as much as I can of the enormous sense of freedom with close friends and fascination with the world that I was so privileged to enjoy myself.

In high school and college I was a football player. I went to St. Lawrence, majoring in math and physics, then did some post-graduate work in mathematics at Stony Brook and then Columbia. After a great couple of years living with friends in Brooklyn I took an evening course in architecture at Columbia and then decided to go to the Univ. of Pa. in the school led then by Louis Kahn for my masters. I began my serious independent research in evolving microclimates of buildings and the general theory of natural systems shortly after that, while living in Denver.

My other source of vision about natural form, other than Kahn, would seem to be Ken Boulding, my dad's best friend when they were junior professors together. It was odd though, I never knew what his work was, or what a visionary nut he really was, until after I'd developed most of my ideas and written papers for the radical exploratory community he had a part in founding, the old Society for General Systems Theory. I must have just overheard some passing comment from him on the front porch, or maybe heard some grudging concession from my dad at the right time that just possibly not everything in the universe was completely logical. I don't know why else the paths would be so separate and similar, toward finding that there can be no self-consistent model of anything in the world except one for asking better questions. Because nature is full of independently organized and behaving things you just can't avoid surprise! ;-)

The sketch is by Terri A Storer, 1976, from my Denver 'heydays'. She was one of my five early spiritual guides, in the upper left. I really could not have gotten anywhere at all without them. Johnnye and Gerry, upper center and right, were earlier friends, Chantal and Butch, below left and right, a little later. When Terri did the sketch I was just out of grad school working as a carpenter and contractor, beginning my traveling micro-climate research, living in a big old "tumbledown" house with a group of friends and my strange solar experiments on the lawn. Financial and medical problems led to returning to Hamilton and then back to NYC, where I've been practicing architecture, writing, pursuing the convection patent and the study of change.

While I've published various papers over the years, my main work as been exploratory research on methods of identifying independently organized natural systems and discovering their surprises. It's been a large technical task involving new math and software design, but that didn't make it useful to others, so I put it down after the failure of my best and most complete writing. I think after 10 submittals, it failed to find a single reviewer to comment on whether local growth curves were likely to indicate local growth processes. After that break, in 2004 I doing it more just for fun, and then started reading extensively for ideas to combine with it, and corresponding. That also coincided with the surprising discovery of our present long foreseeable suite of environmental crises, and the interest in 'sustainability' to relieve these emerging conflicts with a complexity and danger we clearly don't understand. So having fun putting pieces of different people's ideas together in correspondence, buying lots of books and going to conferences on hopeful solutions for the problem, helped me create some new language for discussing it. We're just now becoming able to perceive the unmanageable dimensions of it, and that will help people ask the right questions. The learning has been much more satisfying than before, and perhaps that's another reason I'm perhaps further than ever behind in collecting it in formal writings...

Life, Tools, Arts & What interests me

Desktop Photo Collection
(go to web albums for large images formatted normal & wide) (F11 to view full screen)..

NYCity & Florida

Flora & Country

Interesting fantasy stories by a young writer (Jonathan H. - at 11)

A question concerning the nature of change, ... 3/22/01

I used to paint some, this in from about 1985, called 'ManOnEarth'

Some philosophy in a phrase:

... It's that the circle remains open that there is any place to connect

... What knowledge seems to be good for is reaching for reality, not being reality

... What actually matters is the gracefully possible

... the "gold" rule: Trusting that gold can forever multiply is a perfectly fatal rule.

... Life benefits from the Zen art of finding you always have the right tool already in hand

... If you don't look up, you won't see the horizon, nor hear of the path that leads to and beyond

... It's not the truth that sets you free, it's the true questions that take you there

... it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding what's interesting in what they say

... again, the truer model is the one you look through, not the one you look at!

... every good idea seems to need a little fixing

... When multiplying things until there's trouble, it's not what we're paying attention to that misbehaves!

... the problem with deciding who's right is that everyone is, from a different point of view

... one reward for facing hard truths is finding a place for your deep values

... things that absolutely can't be avoided must be on your path, and good for SOMETHING !

... government doesn't cause interference. It’s interference that causes government. It simplifies government to face approaching realities, and complicates everything to chase them after they're gone.

... finding what science has been missing makes the Earth boundless, unexplored and mysterious again.

... a funny thing about how science has studied 'emergence', searching for the rules for what does not follow them, and ignoring the individual processes by which it develops.

... Faith is having permission to go do it your self

... "Free Will" is a simple gift, the necessity of choosing to engage in exploring to find new choices

... If you choose to hate your enemies and not learn from them, you've lost the battle.

... I whisper in the ear of God day after day, hoping he gets the message

7/14/06 8/12/06 10/14/06 11/1/06 11/12/06 11/22/06 1/7/07 2/14/07 4/26/07 5/10/07

Tools and things - 10/2000 to 7/02/06

Natural science has long been my actual main work, which I've supported with architectural design. Occasionally both have been worth all the trouble it takes to do them well. I’m presently responsible for finishing the public spaces design and detailing all of a $110 million US courthouse for Jackson Mississippi. Other recent architectural work includes significant roles in the design of New York's Bronx Botanic Garden visitor's center, Science, Industry & Business public library (SIBL), the Grand Central terminal renovation, reconstructing St. Agnes cathedral, renovating the Metropolitan club, Jewish Theological Seminary, the Coney Island Steeplechase Ball Park, Grand Rapids Public Library, Niagara Gorge visitor center, SOPAC in South Orange and other projects. Now I'm working at H3, back with old friends. It's good work, and nice to have clients that expect enough to make it fun. I first changed to architecture when physics didn't satisfy my interest in arts and human values, and was then brought back to physics when my study of abstract form in air currents led to finding the curiously obvious unnoticed patterns of locally emergent systems, an opening to the great questions and contradictions of science and nature.

My major work is on the physics of natural systems, called the physics of happening. I think my two principle contributions are a reliable method of identifying emergent natural systems, and using the tools of physics backwards to study them. I use the same mathematical and logical tools as physics, but to detect and watch events develop in the things themselves, carefully exploring autonomous and unstable systems rather than making simplified models of them. In the case of natural systems it seems all models are simplistic.

I've always loved a good shop and tools, with large and small piles of sawdust and metal shavings. Now I just use a computer (well,.. and occasionally get to fix things). I also write a little. I guess, other than my guiding loves, my greatest pleasure when I was young was skiing and as an adult the endless hours of reading to my son and guiding him and his friends in new experience.

Software tools, AutoLisp is the text programming language of AutoCAD, a widely used graphical database for engineering, manufacturing and design. Macro is a library of general purpose drawing utilities and productivity tools. Curve is the library of analytical tools used in derivative reconstruction. I'm trying to convert to R but it's slow doing it by myself with lots of other things to do too, so it probably won't happen till I get some help. The AutoCAD platform is missing many valuable statistical tools but also does things that simply can't be done in conventional statistical packages, like record the history of one's successive treatments of a data set, or use data sets with irregular time lines as variables in data equations....

A question...ed 3/22/01

...any physical event, a wink or a collapsing star, is a chain of natural events combining a myriad of others spanning a tremendous range of scales, propagating multiplying effects in flowing patterns, taking time and development to proceed. Mathematics isn't what is happening, though that's one of the best tools we have for describing it. The scientific name for it is 'local emergence' [well, not the Santa Fe variety, ed.2/06]. It's so much a part of events might we also just call it 'change', or 'happening'?

Does all change Evolve?

Take the formation of a crystal. It begins small, around some seed, and proceeds at an increasing speed as the crystallization fringe expands, first more and then less rapidly, until it approaches its natural limit. Then there's a crystal, a new steady state, the result of a swelling and waning pattern of history dependent events, a flow. This same general acceleration and climaxing sequence is evident in complex successions of innumerable kinds, and may be present in change universally. Some of its parts are always strictly local in origin and action. Everything that happens seems to happen that very same way, so why's it a mystery?

These chains of events follow a strict sequence, speeding up and then slowing down. They absolutely never start in the middle, with slowing down for example, but always start at the beginning of the succession and end at the natural succession's end. No matter what you do you can't get either a physical or intellectual model of a process of change to work properly without the tell-tale these little start-up and shut-down sequences that mark its departure from a past form and a final arrival at a new one.

Scientific tools can partly test the question by allowing us to take direct measures of change to see if transitional curves, developing rates, are to be found connecting steady states. Such growth rate curves are a sign of history dependent processes and locally developing causation. It is not so much whether a sequence of measurements fits a growth equation. It's whether there's any process at all connecting the end points of change. What is commonly found connecting steady states are the ever-present logistic ('S') curves, frequently regular, but non-steady state, smooth transitional progressions connecting changes in kind.

Logistic curves are unusually pervasive in the measures of transitional events of every scale and duration. They occur precisely during the time intervals where fundamental change is occurring, where the past and future formulas do not apply, and where it is especially hard to describe what's going on. This coincidence is a marvel of nature that goes relatively unnoticed in the body of science. I don't believe there is a chapter in any physics text simply called 'change', 'happening' or its equivalent. We work around it all the time, but never really address the subject. The question is, what do those easily observable orderly in-between periods represent?

Are they the evidence of evolving systems, exploding and fading successions of events too complex for us to yet understand, the smooth and silent workings of radical transformation, the pervasively evident but completely mysterious way it all works?

continued

Philip Forbes Henshaw... on natural systems ( why ?) ) eds. 3/9/04,8/12/05, 2,4,5,6,7/06, 5/07, 3,9/08, 2/7/09 2/23, 3/14 3/18 4/10 05/20/09 6/13 6/17