# Robert Laughlin - A Different Universe Laughlin (2005) [A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Different_Universe) ## [Lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qCSpWjsAiE): where is the frontier of science today? how to reconcile the physical sciences and the life sciences? living with uncertainty! physical scientists like myself are moralists we have a very powerful sense for right and wrong and in fact satisfying our hunger for right and wrong is what drives us into physical science we like the idea of an experiment that is just clean and succinct and tells us that our idea is right or isnt right ... this certainty among physical quantities is highly non-obvious the reason it is so comfortable for a Western person is that it is compatible with out religious believes ... life sciences are polytheistic ... the so-called age of biology is in fact a transition from science as certainty to science as uncertainty and it is extremely traumatic and it is one of the reasons that those of us in scientific professions are confused nowadays dealing with science nature and our governments ... the knowledge of one thing is not sufficient to anticipate the behaviour of many and this is the reason that knowledge of fundamentals often is not the frontier ... ![image.png](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/H12MCmXQT.png) there is a concept of a pile and it smothers you and this concept of a pile is transcendent it doesnt matter what the parts are ... if you study the motion of one apple very carefully and think hard and gets lots of computers you might be able to anticipate what the pile is doing but you see its conceptually wrong ... tons of information about the wrong thing ... the principle of organization is the important thing ... this is what happened to science ... what matters is not the apples but the pile from which they are made ... the law of rigidity comes about collectively and when you examine its part to find out where this law of rigidity comes from you find it vanishes away like the meaning of the painting of Monet newton's laws of motion are emergent from quantum mechanics by a process that is poorly understood to this day so newtons laws are collective also the existence of quantitative relationships between measured things is a miracle isnt it rather bizarre that there are two kinds of htis miracle, there is a kind of law that just is (miracle number one), there is a kind of law that comes about because of principles of organization (miracle number two), isnt that shocking that nature would have vetted two miracles both of which do the same thing, it is especially disturbing when you examine one of the most fundamental ones carefully and you discover that it is not fundamental, you begin to worry that maybe our dogmatic view of physical law isnt right, maybe it's been colored by the religious roots of our civilization, maybe in fact there is only one kind of miracle and that is collective in nature and maybe it is the case that only law that comes from the collective exists in nature ![image.png](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/HJC_NE7Qp.png) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_von_Klitzing the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hall_effect is a collective law the dark side of protection ... the emergence of physical law protects you, it allows you to predict things, it allows you not to worry about the chaos, but there is a dark side, the dark side is that **the underlying cause is then unknowable**, once the law has emerged the little parts out of which it is constructed no longer are knowable without experiments that transcend the protection and this is exactly the problem with moder theories of the universe and in particular string theory, the evidence is telling you that the universe is protected that is that there are emergent laws at work and whent that is true you will never be able to figure out the underlying microscopics of the universe by just thinking, **the dark side of protection is like an epistemolotical barrier**, it prevents you from ever falsifying your theories by experiment and therefore prevents you from ever knowing what the real cause is In the old paradigm of physical science we are on the path of reductionism, that is, we are finding out about the world by splitting it into ever smaller pieces. Now these pieces have gotten ludicrously small, tiny fractions of a nucleon. Why is this not the frontier? The answer is that those little parts are not the origin of the law. The law that matters is emergent. It is lying all around you. It is contained in the way nature organizes itself and not revealed at all by study of its parts. If you want to understand the law you have to step back from Nature the same way you step back from a painting of Monet. And when you do you will find the frontier. Where is the frontier? It is all around you. Just look around you, there are thousands of things that you dont understand. **The age we are in now is the age of emergence.** The state where the frontier of science is the study of how things are organizing themselves spontaneously to create this magnificient hierarchy of laws of laws of laws that is our natural world. Reductionism is not wrong, is just been rendered irrelevant by its children and its children's children, the higher organizing laws of the world. ## Talk at the SETI Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF869nAYlfQ same sequence of cartoons, but some more details what is the relationship between biological laws and physical laws? piles do follow laws (such as the [angle of repose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_repose)) that are emergent from the small parts they are built from but not dependent on them ... Laughlin calls these laws transcendent because it is the same law whatever the parts are ... why is ice rigid? on the nano scale ice is not rigid, on the nano scale there is no difference between solid and liquid. the difference becomes apparent only as the scale increases. crystallization is the most primitive and simple example of broken symmetry[^gptsymmetry] ... other example are magnetism, superfluidity, superconductivity; broken symmetry creates laws that are analogous to rigidity, in the case of a superconductor the law is the ability to conduct electricity at zero ohms, ... fountain effect, Schroedinger's cat: Newtonianess is emergent. Newton's law are emergent. There is no logical way to from quantum to Newton just as there is no logical way to prove that solids are rigid. ![PastedGraphic-1.png](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/H1i6RUVQa.png =300x) Computers take on a life of their own. We all know it is just a machine, but it isn't. It is doing stuff. Lauhglin goes on to say that at around 43min that e and h can be computed from emergent laws. Does that mean that h and e are not fundamental but also emergent? The way we know things are true in nature is we find they are redundant. There is now way to tell fundamental and emergent laws apart, except to ratchet your experiment down to small scales so that the law begins to fail, then you know it was definitely emergent ... so the conundrum you get in is that the difference between a fundamental law and a derivative law is a figment of your imagination ... there is no experiment that proves that gravity is fundamental ... nasty things like quantum phase transitions ... there are barriers to what you can now that come out of nature itself ... 1:16:00 the point of this story is not that things are hopeless in biology, but rather that I know cases in more primitive things where there is blockage to this deductive path that comes from nature itself, and we actually know why the blockage is there, it is not because you are dumb, it's because of the way it is organizing; things will work out with genetics as they will; my bet is that this particular path is going to end unhappily; an the reason is that i think that biological systems have encrypted themelves; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvy7zXF-bk8 if you do an xray measurement on a little piece of water or a little piece of ice you cannot tell them apart > (how little is little here?) [Robert Laughlin - Why Do We Search for Symmetry?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxjg9aH8ctk) > what about snowflake symmetry? snowflakes have 6-fold symmetries, but in very complicated ways ... is there some math that describes which symmetries appear in reality broken symmetry is an historical term, it usually means sth like choice, sometimes it mean sth like crystallization (atoms lined up here but could have lined up here, it means newtonianness, they lost their quantum properties), broken symmetry just means phase transition (like water and ice) [Robert Laughlin - Is Emergence Fundamental?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT9iDcajqMo) scaling of charge: if you measure the electron, the charge increases with the speed of the electron ### Further Reading - [Rigidity of the Laughlin liquid](https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03818) - [Klaus von Klitzing - "The quantum Hall effect and the revised SI" 26th CGPM Meeting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMnxuA2ljwc) - Laughlin [Fractional Qunatization](https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/laughlin-lecture.pdf), Nobel Lecture One of my favorite times in the academic year occurs in early spring when I give my class of extremely bright graduate students, who have mastered quantum mechanics but are otherwise unsuspecting and innocent, a take- home exam in which they are asked to deduce superfluidity from first prin- ciples. There is no doubt a special place in hell being reserved for me at this very moment for this mean trick, for the task is impossible. Superfluidity, like the fractional quantum Hall effect, is an emergent phenomenon - a low-energy collective effect of huge numbers of particles that cannot be deduced from the microscopic equations of motion in a rigorous way and that disappears completely when the system is taken apart). There are prototypes for super- fluids, of course, and students who memorize them have taken the first step down thelong road to understanding the phenomenon, but these are all ap proximate and in the end not deductive at all, but fits to experiment. The students feel betrayed and hurt by this experience because they have been trained to think in reductionist termsand thus to believe that everything not amenable to such thinking is unimportant. But nature is much more heart- less than I am, and those students who stay in physics long enough to se- riously confront the experimental record eventuallycome to understand that the reductionist idea is wrong a great deal of the time, and perhapsalways. One common response in the early stages of learning is that superconduc- tivity and the quantum Hall effect are not fundamental and thereforenot worth taking seriously. When this happens I just open up the AIP Handbook and show the disbeliever that the accepted values of e and h are defined by these effects, and that ends that. The world is full of things for which one's understanding, ie. one's ability to predict what will happen in an experiment, is degraded by taking the system apart, including most delightfully the standard model of elementary particles itself. I myself have come to suspect that all the important outstanding problems in physicsare emergent in nature, including particularly quantum gravity. ## Renaissance Physicist [Robert B. Laughlin & Steve Weinberg at MIT - 2007 Physics Symposium](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sOAdbA1UMI) phyiscs with a small p (physics with a large P is departmental warfare ) people who know a lot of things are really not welcome an industrialism that is fundamentally hostile to intellectualism Crime of Reason ... the sequestration of knowledge has become so severe and has accelerated to so much that it is actually now agianst the law to know figure out certain things for yourself ... the atomic energy act of 1954 ... nuclear energy was already mature in 1954 but ... there are big thunks of semiconductor technology, of laser technology, ... the Morland hydrogen bomb case ... Wen Ho Li case ... there is disappearing knowledge in the case of biology also ... it is disappearing by virtue of the funding algorithm ... bacteria research ... strengthening of intellectual property laws ... microsoft has patented the verb ... the entire idea of public domain knowledge is rejected by people very high up in society ... (In 2007!) The internet has an economics problems and the problem is that the communication is free. It is filling up with garbage. The endpoint of this, I am reasonably sure, is another version of television in which there is tons of information on the internet but no knowledge. Actually, when it comes to industrial things, lawyers have teams of people preventing the knowledge from being accessible on the internet. If you put it on the internet they will sue you. And of course there is disinformation as well. So no, I dont think the internet is the revolution that everybody thought it was. I reiterate, in this rapidly changing time you can't evade the responsibility as a physicist to be the Renaissance person that the engineering university needs. It is very very important. 57:10 ... I am putting my Livermore hat on ... Stephen Weinberg: The [union of concerned scientists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Concerned_Scientists) [^gptsymmetry]: GPT says: "Symmetry breaking doesn't exactly create new laws of physics. Instead, it reveals different aspects or regimes of the existing laws that weren't apparent in the symmetrical state. The underlying laws of physics remain the same, but the observable phenomena and behaviors of the system can change dramatically." ... this is different from how Laughlin sees it ... Robert Laughlin, a renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, has proposed some intriguing perspectives on symmetry breaking, particularly in the context of condensed matter physics. His ideas are often encapsulated in the concept of "emergence." Laughlin's views are primarily focused on the idea that new, emergent laws of physics can arise in certain systems due to symmetry breaking. These emergent laws aren't necessarily contained within or predictable from the fundamental laws of physics. Instead, they emerge at larger scales or higher levels of complexity due to collective behaviors of particles in these systems. For example, in superconductivity (a phenomenon for which Laughlin shared the Nobel Prize), electrons form pairs (Cooper pairs) and move without resistance. This is a collective behavior that's not evident if you look at individual electrons. The laws that describe superconductivity are emergent laws, arising from the symmetry-broken state of the system, and they aren't simply derivable from the basic laws that govern individual electrons. The concept of "fractional quantum Hall effect" (FQHE), another area of Laughlin's work, is another example of emergent behavior. In FQHE, electrons in a 2D system under a strong magnetic field behave as if they have fractional charge, which is not anticipated by the fundamental laws of physics that state electron charge is indivisible. In essence, Laughlin's stance is that new laws can emerge in complex systems due to symmetry breaking, and these emergent laws may not be directly derived from or reduced to the fundamental laws of physics. This view underscores the importance of understanding physics not just at the most fundamental level, but also at the level of emergent, collective behaviors of particles in complex systems.