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Monday, October 11, 2010

A Short Note On Complexity in Nature


I was thinking about complexity this morning.

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When we zoom out from a given scene, we embrace more and more complexity. Although we cannot directly perceive this complexity, we can imagine it being there.

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As we zoom out we embrace more and more collections of matter and interrelationships between them. As we zoom back in, there is less stuff, and presumably fewer relationships.

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As we keep zooming in we get down to the level of organic molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of elementary particles, which are perhaps made of strings:

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I was wondering if the universe was "programmed" like body plan is programmed via our genome. DNA is a base-four digital code that, when evaluated, defines the body plan of most organisms, except for RNA viruses.

These collections of particles were "smart enough" to sweep their orbits clean when they were the size of planets, condensing from accretion disks:

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So my thought is, "What if complexity increases as we zoom in? That is, the scale we live at is actually one of intermediate (apparent) complexity."

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If this is true, then the more we search for elementary particles at ever increasing energies, the more we will find.


I am curious about this idea and if there is an encoding of universe body plan at the subatomic level.

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