That statement from Steven Johnson’s ’emergence’ book describing the social structures emerging from harvester ants colonies as well as the development evolution of the city of Manchester, brings about a striking similarity from the totaly different field of quantum dynamics and especially the double slit experiment where likewise dots on the screen behind the two slits appear here and there, uncoordinated, as the photons, electrons or other subatomic particles are fired at the slits one at time to finally reveal the intrerference pattern familiar when light passes through the two slits.
In what way could that be significant? Could the processes responsible for either phenomena somehow follow similar paths? Both are bewildering on their own account. For the case of the double slit experiment indicates the dual nature of photons being waves and particles too. Sometimes behaving like particles, exhibiting particle properties and sometimes behaving like waves, exhibiting wave properties. But the sinister side of it all is that the duality is compromised when they are directly observed. When there is a detector between the double-slit and the receiving screen the photons behave like particles and all fall in the same spot, like pebbles thrown through the slits and do not give the interference pattern.
Insofar, the similarity between these two disparate phenomena appear non-specific. The only thing that connects them is the creation of a pattern when there was none. Could the emergence instance used to explain the phenomenon in the case of harvester ants can be used to explain the double-slit interference phenomenon? It might be applicable if there is a population of entities, and such a population exists only if we look the phenomenon through the interpretation of Feynman. The multiple paths that a single photon takes, in the same instant, in its journey from where it is fired until it hits the screen, can be the ‘entities’, and out of these entities emerge the interference pattern. In that case, it is quantum mechanics that receives ideas from chaos.
But what if this similarity, even though not directly attributable, would define emergence phenomena, the kind Steven Johnson deals with in his book, as quantum phenomena, with all the implications such a description entails, and therefore complete the cycle of the very small with the very big.
ChaosandOrder 