The New Science

 

What does the word "science" conjure up? Slow advances by an established routine of observation and experimentation, the careful testing of hypotheses, publication of results in respectable journals, the findings validated by other workers? Certainly a good deal of science does progress by agreed procedures. Objectivity is stressed and rigorous procedures are adopted to remove experimenter bias. Whatever the field, the experiment or observations may be repeated and the same results obtained by anyone with the correct equipment and training.

And whatever the discipline, the method certainly works. Progress in the last hundred years has been staggering, and now even psychology, medicine, sociology and anthropology strive to emulate the hard sciences, even if at long removes.

But even in the hard sciences, the methodology has its problems. What exactly are electrons? They behave both as particles and a wave action. Perplexingly, they disappear when they meet their opposite number, the positron. Worse still, they obey statistical laws, the Shrödinger wave equations only indicating the percentage likelihood of an electron being in a certain position with a certain speed. Of course we can rationalize the situation, say that an electron is like nothing else but an electron, and that the very act of observing upsets its speed and position. But that is not the orthodox view, or very comforting. The electron is a lepton, one of the fundamental building blocks of matter, and if these blocks do not have solid objective existence, what does? The building blocks seem inter-linked in a way they should not be, moreover, seeming to communicate instantaneously — faster than the speed of light, which the General Theory of Relativity declares impossible.

But if the world is stranger than we can conceive it, it is no longer in areas we cannot enter, the very small or the very large. Science has traditionally dealt with reversible, linear situations: small causes which have small effects, and are totally predictable. But most of the world is not that way at all. Scientists only reported the experiments that worked, that provided the simple relationships they were looking for. Instead of continually seeking what does not exist, we should perhaps acccept that we live in a web of mutually supporting beliefs, assumptions, ways of looking at and responding to things.

Called by a variety of names — study of dissipative structures, complex systems, life systems {13} — this view has grown from the unexpected fusion of two very different fields. One is computer simulation of complex systems that hover on the border between chaos and regularity. The other is the behaviour of living organisms.

Complex systems are now an immense field of study, difficult to summarize briefly, but one essential feature is non-linearity. The future behaviour of the system depends on its prior behaviour and through feed-backs has an inbuilt element of randomness. The system will exhibit areas of simple behaviour: movement towards a single point, or oscillation between two or more points, but there will also areas of chaotic behaviour where the smallest change in prior conditions causes wild fluctuations later on. But even more characteristic of these systems is what are termed strange attractors. The system revolves round certain points, continually tracing trajectories which are very similar but never exactly identical.

Poems act as strange attractors. They organize themselves. The writer submits words to the embryonic arrangement of the poem — a phrase, a conjectured verse form, intellectual argument, controlling emotion — but thereafter the poem takes over, creating an arrangement of words that is not easily changed. Poets often produce cycle of poems, recognizable in theme and form, but differing slightly from poem to poem. Literary periods also see these cycles of creation: a common technique or subject matter or Zeitgeist. Strange attractors have exactly these properties: similarities but not repetitions, an independence, a reluctance to shift far from their previous shape and position.

Certainly these are conjectural matters. But consider the complex systems of brain functioning, the schemas that may operate to create our sense of reality, the part which metaphors and other tropes play in literature, and there arises a possible explanation of the enormous power of poetry: its ability to recreate experience with startling vividness, to evoke deep emotions, to condense large areas of thought in compelling arrangements of a few words. And note too how the features of artworks — pleasing shape, autonomy, emotional appeal and significance — arise out the materials themselves. The artist may guide and judge, but there are no stratagems or recipes, no foolproof procedures for success. Note also that strange attractors develop on the edge of chaos, as do artistic creations, with the artist is not wholly in control. None of these is conclusive, even when taken together, but the parallels are obvious and intriguing.

A fuller account is given on TextEtc.

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