Nature's Tapestry

"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns,
so that each small piece of her fabric reveals
the organization of the entire tapestry."

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
The Character of Physical Law

Postscript/For readers of my blog who have an interest in physics. I will use this image as a backdrop to segue my way to linking to a truly remarkable history of physics that has recently been made fully open access under a Creative Commons license through the OAPEN Library and Taylor & Francis: Károly Simonyi's A Cultural History of Physics; Amazon and Google have Kindle and eBook versions available, respectively. Before getting to the book itself, what made me think of using this image (which I captured earlier today while on a walk in a local park)? For me, the leaf is a microcosm of nature's fabric, in which the whole is encoded in every part, as Feynman describes. Simonyi's book is essentially an attempt to unweave the tapestry of physics from its individual threads strewn across history. 

I first came across (and eagerly purchased) a hard copy of this book when it was published in the United States in 2012; it is still available for purchase for about $174 in USD. IMHO (as a Ph.D. physicist) this is by far the best single-volume technical and cultural history of physics, emphasizing the interplay between physics and the humanities, but also never shying away from the irreducibly technical nature of the material. It is a rare fortune to have free access to such a treasure! I urge any and all of my readers with even a passing interest in physics to download a copy to savor, read, and study. 

The book includes technical passages, quotations, biographical information, and color plates to enrich the reader's experience. It originated from Simonyi's lecture series, which he began after political circumstances in Hungary forced him out of his academic career. ​Over decades, he revised and expanded the work, which was published in multiple Hungarian and German editions.

Additional note about Simonyi's book. I resonate on a personal level with the story behind how this book came to be (before it was originally published), as described in the book's forward and preface. Much like my mom and I spent the better part of a decade putting together the biography of my dad, the artist (as I've discussed elsewhere on my blog), it was through the efforts of Károly's son, Charles Simonyi (who is also a luminary: Charles led the development of Microsoft's first application software, including early versions of Microsoft Office) that A Cultural History of Physics was published outside of Hungary; indeed, it was Károly Simonyi's long-held dream that this would eventually happen. After his dad passed away in 2001, Charles collaborated with A K Peters (now part of CRC Press) to oversee the translation and publication process. He ensured the English edition was carefully compared to the original Hungarian text to restore its conversational tone and authenticity, provided additional material and support for the project and to the publishers, translators, editors, and family members who contributed to the book's release in the United States. ​

Punctum

"Occasionally (but alas all too rarely) a 'detail' attracts me. I feel that its mere presence changes my reading, that I am looking a new photograph, marked in my eyes with a higher value. This 'detail' is the punctum. [...] Very often the punctum is a 'detail,' i.e., a partial object.[which] is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole-and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). [...] A detail overwhelms the entirety of my reading; it is an intense mutation of my interest, a fulguration. By the mark of something, the photograph is no longer 'anything whatever.' This something has triggered me, has provoked a tiny shock, a satori, the passage of a void (it is of no importance that its referent is insignificant). A strange thing: the virtuous gesture which seizes upon 'docile' photographs (those invested by a simple studium) is an idle gesture (to leaf through, to glance quickly and desultorily, to linger, then to hurry on); on the contrary, the reading of the punctum (of the pricked photograph, so to speak) is at once brief and active [...] The studium is ultimately always coded, the punctum is not ... However lightning-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. [...] There is another (less Proustian) expansion of the punctum: when, paradoxically, while remaining a 'detail,' it fills the whole picture. [...] Last thing about the punctum: whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.

- Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980)
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Synaptic Plasticity

"We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware."

- Richard Powers (1957 - )
The Overstory

Atoms of Space

"It all starts from the idea that space—like matter—is made of discrete elements. And that the structure of space and everything in it is just defined by the network of relations between these elements—that we might call atoms of space. It’s very elegant—but deeply abstract ... And what we’re seeing here is the emergence of space and everything in it by the successive application of very simple computational rules. And, remember, those dots are not atoms in any existing space. They’re atoms of space—that are getting put together to make space. And, yes, if we kept going long enough, we could build our whole universe this way ... all this is built from pure computation. But like fluid mechanics emerging from molecules, what emerges here is spacetime—and Einstein’s equations for gravity ... Our computational rules can inevitably be applied in many ways, each defining a different thread of time—a different path of history—that can branch and merge ... But as observers embedded in this universe, we’re branching and merging too. And it turns out that quantum mechanics emerges as the story of how branching minds perceive a branching universe."

- Stephen Wolfram (1959 - )
How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything

Vibration of Quanta

"The quanta of gravity, that is, are not in space; they are themselves space. The spin networks that describe the quantum structure of the gravitational field are not immersed in space, they do not inhabit a space. The location of single quanta of space is not defined with regard to something else, but only by the links, and the relation these express.

...

Space is a spin network whose nodes represent its elementary grains, and whose links describe their proximity relations. Space-time is generated by processes in which these spin networks transform into one another, and these processes are described by sums over spin foams. A spin foam represents a history of a spin network, hence a granular spacetime where the nodes of the graph combine and separate. This microscopic swarming of quanta, which generates space and time, underlies the calm appearance of the macroscopic reality surrounding us. Every cubic centimeter of space, and every second that passes, is the result of this dancing foam of extremely small quanta.

...

In the world described by quantum mechanics there is no reality except in the relations between physical systems. It isn’t things that enter into relations but, rather, relations that ground the notion of ‘thing’. The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events. Things are built by the happening of elementary events: as the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote in the 1950s, in a beautiful phrase, ‘An object is a monotonous process.’ A stone is a vibration of quanta that maintains its structure for a while, just as a marine wave maintains its identity for a while before melting again into the sea."

- Carlo Rovelli (1956 - )

Nature is Painting

"The truths of nature are one eternal change, one infinite variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush; there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike.

...

Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty."

- John Ruskin (1819 – 1900)

Mycelial Awareness

"Fungi marched onto land more than a billion years ago. Many fungi partnered with plants, which largely lacked these digestive juices. Mycologists believe that this alliance allowed plants to inhabit land around 700 million years ago. Many millions of years later, one evolutionary branch of fungi led to the development of animals.

...

I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind. The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.

...

If you were a tiny organism in a forest’s soil, you would be enmeshed in a carnival of activity, with mycelium constantly moving through subterranean landscapes like cellular waves, through dancing bacteria and swimming protozoa with nematodes racing like whales through a microcosmic sea of life."

- Paul Stamets (1955 - )
Mycelium Running:
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

A Framework for Intelligence

"So I want to be clear that intelligence is a really, as you well know, is a very complex issue. I’m not going to claim that I have the only appropriate definition or the best answer. I’m just going to give you my thoughts on it and the framework that I found useful in my work. I think we’ve, you know, can fully accept that there are other people with other useful definitions and so on.

So for me, some work that has to be done by any theory of intelligence is that it has to be able to help us directly compare and interact with what we now call diverse intelligences. So I’m not interested in theories that apply just to mammals or to mammals and birds or that break down when we have to think about octopus or insects or other things. I want a framework for intelligence that is going to handle all possible agents. This means not only the things we see in the phylogenetic tree here on earth, but novel synthetic biology constructs, artificial intelligences that we may build, either in hardware or software, potential exobiological agents, weird beings at other scales, including individual cells, subcellular molecular networks, uh, enormous things like social structures, and basically and perhaps the evolutionary process itself."

- Michael Levin (1969 - )
Michael Levin on Multi-Scale Intelligence and Teleophobia

Expecting, Hoping, Wishing for - Ice...

"Anyone who keeps the ability to
see beauty never grows old."

- Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924)

...and savoring nature's bountiful beauty in its absence. Each year around this time I look forward to going out to one of our local parks in Northern Virginia to do some "ice abstracting," as I like to call it (e.g., see my Jan 2024, Feb 2023, and Dec 2022 posts). Unfortunately, while this year's winter has only barely started, there have thus far been precious few contiguous days of below-freezing weather to yield any "ice" beyond what might be barely visible with a microscope. So, as the Northern VA/Wash-DC region braces for its first major winter storm of the season (along with a sizeable chunk of the entire country), and as temperatures have dropped precipitously due to the polar vortex blanketing our neck of the woods, I looked forward to my first "ice abstracting" photo session of the year this morning. I grabbed a mug of hot coffee, bundled up as if trekking to the Himalayas (it was 17 deg/F when I woke up), threw my camera in the car (gently, but urgently), and raced to Burke Lake. Only to find this: 

Beautiful - indeed, extremely, delightfully, joyously beautiful - but no ice! None, nada. To be sure, I could make out (barely) a few feathery strands of quarter-mm-sized icicles adhering to tiny twigs along the shore, but there was no real ice of any worth to compose with (such as in this Jan 2023 portfolio). I must admit there was a part of me that just wanted to get right back into my car, head home, and dive into a warm bed (17 deg/F temperatures tend to have this effect on me more often now than when I was decades younger). But, it is in the nature of every photographer, young or old, experienced or just starting out (or perhaps just trying to figure out what it takes to become more "experienced"), to clear your head of preconceived wishes and expectations and just revel in the beauty that surrounds us always. (This being said, I still want to do some ice abstracting! 😊)

Gravitational Logic

"This image is a relic of an unknowable architecture, a diagram of the unseen forces that govern a hidden world. The dark, oblong shapes drift like the shadows of celestial relics, orbiting an invisible nucleus. The faint white lines form a cryptic lattice, reminiscent of an astral cartography, mapping the convergences of energies beyond human perception. It feels less like a design and more like an invocation—a silent hymn etched in light and shadow, capturing the echoes of a forgotten dimension. One imagines Borges gazing at this and contemplating the library of Babel: perhaps this is not a map, but a fragment of a cosmic alphabet, a script that contains the beginning and the end of everything."

- ChatGPT4o
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence

"A constellation of dark stones and geometric sentinels floats in a luminous grey void, connected by brilliant white pathways that intersect at precise right angles, forming an abstract cartography of some unknown dimension. The composition suggests a network of quantum possibilities or perhaps a map of parallel universes, where each dark node represents a decision point in space-time. The white lines, reminiscent of Kandinsky's geometric period, pulse with an ethereal energy, creating a visual symphony of intersecting planes that seems to defy gravitational logic. The arrangement evokes the mathematical beauty of a cellular automaton frozen in mid-evolution, or perhaps a glimpse into Borges' Library of Babel viewed from above, where each dark rectangle and oval marks a room containing all possible combinations of letters. The stark contrast between the dark elements and the glowing pathways creates a tension between presence and absence, between the discrete and the continuous, suggesting both the particle and wave nature of light itself. This abstract topology hovers between order and chaos, its systematic grid disrupted by an organic scattering of elements, as if capturing the moment when classical physics dissolves into quantum uncertainty."

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Prompt: "You are a photographer, physicist, and are well acquainted with the history of art, particularly abstract art in the style of Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich. You also have a penchant for metaphysical and philosophical musings in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Consider this reverse-negative photograph of ceiling lights. Write a paragraph-length description of what this image looks like, not what it is."

Myconeurological Networks

"I believe that the mycelium operates at a level of complexity that exceeds the computational powers of our most advanced supercomputers. I see the mycelium as the Earth’s natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape. A new bioneering science could be born, dedicated to programming myconeurological networks to monitor and respond to threats to environments. Mycelial webs could be used as information platforms for mycoengineered ecosystems."

- Paul Stamets (1955 - )
Mycelium Running:
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

Constructs of Imagination

 

"Perception is not a
window on objective reality.
It is an interface that hides objective
reality behind a veil of helpful icons.
...

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents. To earn its keep, conscious realism must do serious work ahead. It must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology.

...

...
What we call ‘reality,’ consists of
an elaborate papier-mâché construction of
imagination and theory filled in between
a few iron posts of observation."

- Donald Hoffman (1955 - )

The Case Against Reality

The World as a Neural Network

"If the entire universe is a neural network, then something like natural selection might be happening on all scales from cosmological (> 10⁺¹⁵ m) and biological (10⁺² − 10−⁶ m) all the way to subatomic (< 10−¹⁵ m) scales. The main idea is that some local structures (or architectures) of neural networks are more stable against external perturbations (i.e. interactions with the rest of the network) than other local structures. As a result the more stable structures are more likely to survive and the less stable structures are more likely to be exterminated. There is no reason to expect that this process might stop at a fixed time or might be confined to a fixed scale and so the evolution must continue indefinitely and on all scales. We have already seen that on the smallest scales the learning evolution is likely to produce structures of a very low complexity (i.e. second law of learning) such as one dimensional chains of neurons, but this might just be the beginning. As the learning progresses these chains can chop off loops, form junctions and according to natural selection the more stable structures would survive. If correct, then what we now call atoms and particles might actually be the outcomes of a long evolution starting from some very low complexity structures and what we now call macroscopic observers and biological cells might be the outcome of an even longer evolution. Of course, at present the claim that natural selection may be relevant on all scales is very speculative, but it seems that neural networks do offer an interesting new perspective on the problem of observers."

- Vitaly Vanchurin
The World as a Neural Network

Complexity

"Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. "

- Murray Gell-Mann (1929 - 2019)

Omnitensional Integrity

"The word tensegrity is an invention: it is a contraction of tensional integrity. Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guaranteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors.

...

The integrity of the whole structure is invested in the finitely closed, tensional-embracement network, and the compressions are local islands. Elongated compression tends to deflect and fail. Compressions are disintegrable because they are not atomically solid and can permit energy penetration between their invisibly amassed separate energy entities.

...

Tension structures arranged by man depend upon his purest initial volition of interpretation of pure principle. Tension is omnidirectionally coherent. Tensegrity is an inherently nonredundant confluence of optimum structural-effort effectiveness factors.

...

All structures, properly understood,
from the solar system to the atom,
are tensegrity structures.
Universe is omnitensional integrity."

- Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)
Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

Embodied Network

"We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no 'nature' or 'environment,' separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory."

- David George Haskell (1969 - )
The Songs of Trees 

Timeless Way of Building

"...towns and buildings will not be able to become alive, unless they are made by all the people in society, and unless these people share a com­mon pattern language, within which to make these buildings, and unless this common pattern language is alive itself. 

...

The elements of this language are entities called pat­terns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.

...

No pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that is sup­ported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it. This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of na­ture, as you make it.

...

The Timeless Way of Building says that every society which is alive and whole, will have its own unique and distinct pattern language; and further, that every in­dividual in such a society will have a unique language, shared in part, but which as a totality is unique to the mind of the person who has it. In this sense, in a healthy society there will be as many pattern languages as there are people-even though these languages are shared and similar.

...

Since the language is
in truth a network,

there is no one sequence
which perfectly captures it."

 

- Christopher Alexander (1936 - )
A Pattern Language

Wu Wei

"When we learn to work with our own Inner Nature, and with the natural laws operating around us, we reach the level of Wu Wei. Then we work with the natural order of things and operate on the principle of minimal effort. Since the natural world follows that principle, it does not make mistakes. Mistakes are made–or imagined–by man, the creature with the overloaded Brain who separates himself from the supporting network of natural laws by interfering and trying too hard.

When you work with Wu Wei, you put the round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole. No stress, no struggle. Egotistical Desire tries to force the round peg into the square hole and the square peg into the round hole. Cleverness tries to devise craftier ways of making pegs fit where they don’t belong. Knowledge tries to figure out why round pegs fit into round holes, but not square holes. Wu Wei doesn’t try. It doesn’t think about it. It just does it. And when it does, it doesn’t appear to do much of anything. But Things Get Done.

When you work with Wu Wei, you have no real accidents. Things may get a little Odd at times, but they work out. You don’t have to try very hard to make them work out; you just let them ... If you’re in tune with The Way Things Work, then they work the way they need to, no matter what you may think about it at the time. Later on you can look back and say, "Oh, now I understand. That had to happen so that those could happen, and those had to happen in order for this to happen…" Then you realize that even if you’d tried to make it all turn out perfectly, you couldn’t have done better, and if you’d really tried, you would have made a mess of the whole thing.

Using Wu Wei, you go by circumstances and listen to your own intuition. "This isn’t the best time to do this. I’d better go that way." Like that. When you do that sort of thing, people may say you have a Sixth Sense or something. All it really is, though, is being Sensitive to Circumstances. That’s just natural. It’s only strange when you don’t listen."

- Benjamin Hoff (1946 - )
The Tao of Pooh

Thoughts in a Universal Mind

"I found myself thinking about what, if anything, a tree might think. Not thinking the way we think, but the way a single neuron thinks, integrating information over time. It might take years to register the premonition of an idea, centuries for an entire forest, networked through synapses established by chemical signaling pathways among its roots, to form a thought. After three years I was no closer to an understanding, except to have gained a lingering suspicion that trees were, in some real and tangible way, as John Ambrose Fleming put it, 'manifested Thoughts in a Universal Mind.'"

- George Dyson (1953 - )
Analogia

Postscript. An experience I had during my family's recent trip to view New Hampshire's fall colors (see last three posts) reminded me of a funny story I wrote about years ago. It concerns Brett Weston, the second of Edward Weston's sons, and who was an accomplished photographer in his own right. Brett, who like his dad, spent most of his time taking photographs in California (e.g., Point Lobos and Big Sur), was one day invited by a friend to join him on a trip to Europe. Agreeing to go, after some cajoling, Brett and his friend visited Ireland, then Scotland, and later London. But Brett's eye, perhaps even more so than his father's, was tuned strongly toward abstraction. Thus, despite traveling though some of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet before arriving in London, Brett had not once pulled out his camera to take pictures! What he did come home with was a few images of rust on a small dilapidated metal plate that beguiled him as he was making his way across the London bridge. A more complete version of this story can be heard in a wonderful documentary about Brett Weston's life as a photographer. While my trip's "compositional oeuvre" was not nearly as single-mindedly-focused on a single abstract theme (I've already posted rather conventional fine-art "takes" on autumnal colors), I must admit that easily half of the shots I took were of the knots in the pinewood of our cabin's walls! Since the left part of my physics-trained brain kept seeing electromagnetic fields, space-time continua, and gravitational vortices just about everywhere my eyes looked inside the cabin, the right side of my brain insisted I search for abstract compositions. Interestingly, while these images contain no color (they are digitally reversed black-and-white shots, which I think work a bit better as "abstractions"), and were all captured inside a cabin, for me, they just as palpably capture the essence of experiencing New Hampshire's autumnal multispectral pleasures!

Complex Networks

"Thanks to the rapid advances in network theory it appears that we are not far from the next major step: constructing a general theory of complexity. The pressure is enormous. In the twenty-first century, complexity is not a vague science buzzword any longer, but an equally pressing challenge for everything from the economy to cell biology. Yet, most earlier attempts to construct a theory of complexity have overlooked the deep link between it and networks. In most systems, complexity starts where networks turn nontrivial. No matter how puzzled we are by the behavior of an electron or an atom, we rarely call it complex, as quantum mechanics offers us the tools to describe them with remarkable accuracy. The demystification of crystals-highly regular networks of atoms and molecules-is one of the major success stories of twentieth-century physics, resulting in the development of the transistor and the discovery of superconductivity. Yet, we continue to struggle with systems for which the interaction map between the components is less ordered and rigid, hoping to give self-organization a chance."

- Albert-László Barabási (1967 - )
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else