The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

By Edward Gibbon. A brief collection of excerpts and notes:

Gibbon did not like Oxford. The scholars there were steeped in "port and prejudice." They remembered only that they had a salary and not that they had a duty.

"Such were the arts of war by which the Roman emperors defended their extensive conquests, and preserved a military spirit, at a time when every other virtue was oppressed by luxury and despotism."

Valor without skill is an imperfect virtue.

The modes of worship that prevailed in the Roman world were "all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful."

"The aspiring genius of Rome sacrifice vanity to ambition, and deemed it more prudent, as well as honorable, to adopt virtue and merit for her own wheresoever they were found, among slaves or strangers, enemies or Barbarians."

"It is a just though trite observation that victorious Rome was herself subdued by the arts of Greece."

"In their dress, their table, their houses, and their furniture, the favorites of fortune united every refinement of conveniency, of elegance, and of splendor, whatever could soothe their pride or gratify their sensuality... The most remote countries of the ancient world were ransacked to provide the pomp and delicacy of Rome."

"It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. Their personal valor remained, but they no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command... The posterity of their boldest leaders was contented with the rank of citizens and subjects... The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste."

"A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprises of an aspiring prince."

"It was dangerous to trust the sincerity of Augustus; to seem to distrust it was still more dangerous."

"The names and forms of the ancient administration were preserved by Augustus with the most anxious care... It was on the dignity of the senate that Augustus and his successors founded their new empire... The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed."

"The [successful] emperors...disdained the pomp and ceremony which might offend their countrymen but could add nothing to their real power."

"The tender respect of Augustus for a free constitution which he had destroyed can only be explained by an attentive consideration of the character of that subtle tyrant. A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition prompted him at the age of nineteen to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside. His virtues, and even his vices, were artificial... [He] was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."

"The emperor was elected by the authority of the senate, and the consent of the soldiers."

"Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude... The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries, and the fear of future dangers, all contribute to inflame the mind, and to silence the voice of pity."

"Such formidable servants are always necessary but often fatal tot he throne of despotism. By thus introducing the Praetorian guards as it were into the palace and the senate, the emperors taught them to perceive their own strength, and the weakness of the civil government; to view the vices of their masters with familiar contempt, and to lay aside that reverential awe which distance only, and mystery, can preserve towards an imaginary power."

"Severus...condescended slightly to lament that, to be mild, it was necessary that he should first be cruel... The contemporaries of Severus in the enjoyment of the peace and glory of his reign forgave the cruelties by which it had been introduced. Posterity, who experienced the fatal effects of his maxims and example, justly considered him as the principal author of the decline of the Roman empire."

"The ascent to greatness, however steep and dangerous, may entertain an active spirit with the consciousness and exercise of its own powers: but the possession of a throne could never yet afford a lasting satisfaction to an ambitious mind."

"The fond hopes of the father and of the Roman world were soon disappointed by these vain youths, who displayed the indolent security of hereditary princes, and a presumption that fortune would supply the place of merit and application."

"Military order (modesty in peace and service in war) is best secured by an honorable poverty."

"The grave senators confessed with a sigh that, after having long experienced the stern tyranny of their own countrymen, Rome was at length humbled beneath the effeminate luxury of Oriental despotism."

Decline of the West

By Oswald Spengler. Here are my notes from the Introduction (some is verbatim, some not, and the italics are gone -- sorry):

For everything organic the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime are fundamentals. Is all history founded upon general biographic archetypes?

The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of Being.

The mean whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means are we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.

Thus our theme...the philosophy of the future. It expands into the conception of a morphology of world history, of the world-as-history in contrast to the morophology of the world-as-nature that hitherto has been almost the only theme of philosophy.

What concerns us is not what the historical facts which appear at this or that time are, per se, but what they signify, what they point to, by appearing.

That there is, besides necessity of cause and effect -- which I may call the logic of space -- another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny -- the logic of time -- is a fact of the deepest inward certainty, a fact which suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic thought and constitutes the essence and kernel of all history (in contradistinction to nature) but is unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the "Critique of Pure Reason" investigates...We await, to-day, the philosopher who will tell us in what language history is written and how it is to be read.

Possibilities of world-formation are not necessarily actualities.

For whom is there history? The question is seemingly paradoxical, for history is obviously for everyone to this extent, that every man, with his whole existence and consciousness, is part of history. But it makes a great difference whether anyone lives under the constant impression that his life is an element in a far wider life-course that goes on for hundreds and thousands of years, or conceives of himself as something rounded off and self-contained. For the latter type of consciousness there is certainly no world-history, no world-as-history. But how if the self-consciousness of a whole nation, how if a whole Culture rests on this ahistorical spirit? How must actuality appear to it?

In the world-consciousness of the Hellenes all experience--personal and common--was immediately transmuted into a timeless, immobile, mythically-fashioned background for the particular momentary present (the "pure Present", the negation of time, the polar and not periodic, which fills that life with an intensity that to us is perfectly unknown). Such a spiritual condition is practically impossible for us men of the West, for whom the past is a periodic and purposeful organism of centuries or millennia.

The art of portraiture is biography in the kernel, and in Egypt it was practically the artist's only theme.

The Egyptian Culture is an embodiment of care -- care for the future, and necessarily bound up therewith, care for the past. The Egyptian denied mortality, the Classical man affirmed it in the whole symbolism of his Culture (mummification vs. burning the dead).

To the Classical mind self-examination was deeply foreign. Goethe's works, as he avowed himself, are only fragments of a single great confession!

The Classical mathematical mind conceived of things as they are, as magnitudes, timeless and purely present, as geometry; we conceive things as they become and behave, as function, in flux (Newton named his calculus "fluxions").

The ground of West Europe s treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it -- and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far-away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets! The Ptolemaic system of history.

Goethe's saying, "What is important in life is life and not the result of life," is the answer to any and every senseless attempt to solve the riddle of historical form by means of a programme.

We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form, and duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well, are determined by the properties of its species. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified certainty, a limit, and this sense of the limit is identical with our sense of the inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the contrary, one works upon unlimited possibilities -- never a natural end -- and from the momentary top-course of his bricks plans artlessly the continuation of his structure.

"Mankind," however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids. "Mankind" is a zoological expression, or an empty word. Instead of one linear history, I see the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death. Each Culture has its on new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. These cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton. World-history, then, is a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms.

To-day we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and historians who have not realized that we do so.

But something much more disquieting than a logical fallacy begins to appear when the centre of gravity of philosophy shifts from the abstract-systematic to the practical-ethical and our Western thinkers from Schopenhauer onward turn from the problem of cognition to the problem of life (the will to life, to power, to action).

What correlation is there or can there be of Nietzsche's idea of the "Dionysian" with the inner life of a highly-civilized Chinese or an up-to-date American? [me: the quintessential American philosophy by necessity must be up-to-date and addressed to the inner life.] What is the significance of his type of the "Superman" -- for the world of Islam?

What the West has said and thought, hitherto, has remained narrow and dubious, because men were always looking for the solution of the question. It was never seen that many questioners implies many answers. The real student of mankind treats no standpoint as absolutely right or absolutely wrong. All truths are path-dependent. [me: but the set at any particular time is not limitless; if we can find global truths of mankind (truths about the set), truths that, at the very least, won't change soon, then we can do something indeed. the proper foundation for that is psychology].

Goethe the artist portrayed the life and development of his figures as the thing-becoming and not the thing-become. This is how he could say at the bivouac fire on the evening of the Battle of Valmy: "Here and now begins a new epoch of world history, and you, gentlemen, can say that you 'were there.' "

One grouping of the Faustian soul, public men before all else -- economists, politicians, jurists, [pundits] -- opine that "present-day mankind" is making excellent progress. The danger of this group lies in a clever superficiality. The other grouping, composed above all of belated romanticists -- poets, philosophers, artists, represented by three Basel professors Bachofen, Burckhardt, and Nietzsche -- succumb to the usual dangers of ideology. They lose themselves in the clouds of an antiquity that is really no more than the image of their own sensibility in a philological mirror. Consequently, even in point of critical foundations, neither group takes the other seriously.

It is, however, much the same whether the past is treated in the spirit of Don Quixote or in that of Sancho Panza. Neither way leads to the end.

The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, a strict and necessary organic succession. In this way the Romans were the successors of the Greeks; the Romans were barbarians who did not precede but closed a great development. Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand between the Hellenic Culture and nothingness -- in a word, Greek soul, Roman intellect. Pure Civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive taking-down of forms that have become inorganic or dead. From these periods onward the great intellectual decisions take place, not as in the days of the Orpheus-movement or the Reformation in the "whole world" where not a hamlet is too small to be unimportant, but in three or four world-cities that have absorbed into themselves the whole content of History, while the old wide landscape of the Culture, become merely provincial, serves only to feed the cities with what remains of its higher mankind. World-city and province -- the two basic ideas of every civilization. In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up.

After Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome. After Madrid, Paris, London come Berlin and New York. The world-city means cosmopolitanism in place of "home," cold matter-of-fact in place of of reverence for tradition and age, scientific irreligion as a fossil representative of the older religion of the heart, "society" in place of the state, natural instead of hard-earned rights. And unlike that of the 18th Century, the social-ethical sentiment of the 20th, if it is to be realized at a higher level than that of professional (and lucrative) agitation, is a matter for millionaires.

Money is the hall-mark of a politic of Civilization to-day, in contrast to a politic of Culture yesterday. Not till the Roman Caesarism -- foreshadowed by C. Flaminius, shaped first by Marius, handled by strong-minded, large-scale men of fact -- did the Classical World learn the pre-eminence of money. Without this fact neither Caesar, nor "Rome" generally, is understandable.

After Zama, the Romans never again either waged or were capable of waging a war against a great military Power.

To maintain the heroic posture for centuries on end is beyond the power of any people. Imperialism is to be taken as the typical symbol of the passing away. Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated. Life is the process of effecting possibilities, and for the brain-man there are only extensive possibilities. Hard as the half-developed Socialism of to-day is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-expansionist with all the vehemence of destiny.

Alexander and Napoleon were romantics. Caesar, on the contrary, was a pure man of fact gifted with immense understanding.

He who cannot see that our choice is between willing Caesar and willing nothing, between cleaving to this destiny or despairing of the future and of life itself; he who cannot feel that there is grandeur also in the realizations of powerful intelligences, in the energy and discipline of metal-hard natures, in battles fought with the coldest and most abstract means; he who is obsessed with the idealism of a provincial and would pursue the ways of life of past ages -- must forgo all desire to comprehend history, to live through history or to make history.

It would have been absurd in a Roman of intellectual eminence, who might as Consul or Praetor lead armies, organize provinces, build cities and roads, or even be the Princeps in Rome, to want to hatch out some new variant of post-Platonic school philosophy at Athens or Rhodes. Consequently no one did so. It was not in harmony with the tendency of the age, and therefore it only attracted third-class men of the kind that always advances as far as the Zeitgeist of the day before yesterday.

The solutions of the last philosophy of the West will be got by treating everything as relative, as a historical phenomenon, and its procedure will be psychological -- an unphilosophical philosophy. What is also has become -- the when and the how long hold as deep a secret as the what. Everything, whatever else it may be, must at any rate be the expression of something living . It is perfectly clear that no single fragment of history can be thoroughly illuminated unless and until the secret of world-history itself, to wit the story of higher mankind as an organism of regular structure, had been cleared up.

The World-War was not a momentary constellation of casual facts but the the type of a historical change of phase occurring within a great historical organism of definable compass at the point preordained for it hundreds of years ago. [me: attractors and self-organized criticality, the when, the where in phase space, the potential actualized.]

Stock-taking doctrine -- the confirmation through synthesis of all that has been sought and achieved for generations past, integrating all the truly living tendencies which it finds in the special spheres, no matter what their aim may be.

The structure of rigid being -- principles of causality, of law, of system -- should not be applied to the picture of happenings, to the philosophy of the future.

Goethe (summation of Spengler's philosophy): "The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast." It is the distinction between intuition and analysis.

Complexity Theory and Network Centric Warfare

Excerpts (with the occasional note) from Complexity Theory and Network Centric Warfare, by James Moffat, DOD Command and Control Research Program (2003):

Attempts have been made to develop some general understanding, and ultimately a theory, of systems that consist of many interacting components and many hierarchical layers. It is common to call these systems complex because it is impossible to reduce the overall behaviour of the system to a set of properties characterising the individual components. Interaction is able to produce properties at the collective level that are simply not present when the components are considered individually. As an example, one may think of mutuality and collaboration in ecology. The function of any ecosystem depends crucially on mutual benefits between the different species present.

Another important feature of complex systems is their sensitivity to even small perturbations. The same action is found to lead to a very broad range of responses, making it exceedingly difficult to perform prediction or to develop any type of experience of a "typical scenario."

This must necessarily lead to great caution: do not expect what worked last time to work this time. The situation is exacerbated since real systems (ecological or social) undergo adaptation. This implies that the response to a given strategy most likely makes the strategy redundant [antibiotics, e.g.].

Complex systems cannot be studied independently of their surroundings. Understanding the behaviour of a complex system necessitates a simultaneous understanding of the environment of the system. One should bear in mind that the separation into system, drive, noise, surroundings, etc. is rather arbitrary and is far from representing a complete analysis.

From these considerations, we see that it is vitally important to consider warfare as a complex system that is linked and interacts (in a coevolving way) with the surrounding socioeconomical and political context.

Further work will need to examine how coevolution across the entire network of military, socioeconomical, and political interactions leads firstly to emergent effects at higher levels, and of equal importance how such effects lead to coevolution at the higher level. It will also be important to consider the robustness of such networks, and their vulnerability to damage.

The intricate interrelationships of elements within a complex system give rise to multiple chains of dependencies. Change happens in the context of this intricate intertwining at all scales. We become aware of change only when a different pattern becomes discernible. But before change at a macro level can be seen, it is taking place at many micro levels simultaneously. Hence, microcomponent interaction and change leads to macrosystem evolution.

Benard cells also show the complexity of movement. The cells unfold along the horizontal axis, adopting successively righthanded or left-handed rotation. Our very small observer can now locate his position in space by considering the rotation of the cell he occupies and by counting the number of cells he passes through. The emergence of this notion of space is known as symmetry breaking. When is below the critical value, the homogeneity of the fluid in the horizontal direction renders its different parts independent of each other. In contrast, beyond the threshold, it is as if each volume element is watching the behaviour of its neighbours and is taking this into account in order to play its role adequately and to participate in the overall pattern. This suggests the existence of correlations of statistically reproducible rate relations between distant parts of the system. The characteristic space dimension of a Benard cell is in the millimetre range, whereas the characteristic space scale of the intermolecular forces is in the Angstrom range. That large numbers of particles can behave in a coherent fashion at this long range, despite random thermal motion, is one of the principal properties characteristic of such self-organisation and emergent complex behaviour.

This experiment is reproducible; the same convection patterns will appear at the same threshold value and the process is subject to a strict determinism. However, the direction of the rotation of the cells is unpredictable. The form of the particular perturbation that prevails at the moment of the experiment will decide whether a given cell is right- or left-handed. When the constraint is sufficiently strong, several solutions are possible for the same parameter values and chance alone will decide which of these solutions is realised. In this way, the system has been perturbed from a state of equilibrium or near equilibrium to a state of self-organisation, with a number of possible modes of behaviour.

To summarise, nonequilibrium has enabled the system to transform part of the energy communicated from the environment into an ordered behaviour of a new type: the dissipative structure. This regime is characterised by symmetry breaking, multiple modes of behaviour, and correlation. Such a system is called "open" since it is open to the effect of energy or information flowing into and out of the system. It is also called "dissipative" because of such energy flows, and the resultant dissipation of energy.

If we think of a guided missile attempting to manoeuvre towards a target, the measure of loss is the miss distance relative to the aim point. The control parameters are the settings for the missile fins at a given time t. For simple forms of linear guidance ( e.g., early forms of laser-guided bombs), this leads to what is called bang-bang control, where the missile fins "bang" from one extreme setting to another in order to keep the missile on course. Applied to a linear control system, this maximum principle leads to the solution of bang-bang control.

A characteristic feature of many of the systems encountered in nature, however, is that the F's (laws of system controlling rate of change) are complicated nonlinear functions of the X's (instantaneous states of system). The equations of evolution of this type of system should then admit, under certain conditions, several solutions (rather than just the one optimal solution) since a multiplicity of solutions is the most typical feature of a nonlinear equation. Our assumption will be that these solutions represent the various modes of behaviour of the underlying system.

The most useful view of equilibrium is as follows. We represent the evolution of the system in a space spanned by the state variables (phase space). An instantaneous state of the system is thus represented in phase space by a point. As the system evolves over time, a succession of such states is produced, giving rise to a curve in phase space, which is called a phase space trajectory. In a dissipative dynamical system, as time progresses, the phase space trajectory will tend to a limit representative of the regime reached by the system when all transients die out. We call this regime the attractor. The attractor representing an equilibrium position is unique and describes a time-independent situation. This gives a phase space point towards which all possible histories converge monotonically. The state of equilibrium is therefore a universal point attractor. The goal of self-organisation is thus the search for new attractors that arise when a system is driven away from its state of equilibrium.

By allowing the intrinsic nonlinearity to be manifested in the regime of detailed balance, nonequilibrium can also lead to the coexistence of multiple attractors in state space. The state space can then be carved up into a set of basins. Each of these corresponds to the set of states that, if the system were to start from there, would evolve to a particular attractor. These are known as the basins of attraction. The ridges separating these basins of attraction are called separatrices. The coexistence of multiple attractors constitutes the natural mode of systems capable of showing adapted behaviour and of performing regulatory tasks.

Stability or "robustness to change" is essentially determined by the response of the system to perturbations.

Such critical systems are of particular scientific interest. Systems in critical states do not have any characteristic scale and may therefore exhibit the full range of behavioural characteristics within the particular system restraints. This means that systems at the point of criticality are in a position of optimal flexibility in some sense, as we have noted. It could thus be argued that one of the requirements of military command is to so arrange things that the forces collaborate locally and thus self-organise into this optimal state.

The system becomes critical in the sense that all of the members of the entire system influence each other. For the example ecosystem above, the system self-organises itself into the critical state corresponding to this ability of the entire system to be influenced through the propagation of local coevolution influences and the resultant clusters/avalanches of species that coevolution created.

We will see that these relate to ideas of correlation in space or time (in contrast to coincidence in space or time). Correlation in space or time is a signal of local clustering and collaboration spatially (e.g., across a battlespace) or in time ( e.g., across an information grid–reading e-mail creates a correlation in time between individuals, taking a phone call creates a coincidence in time).

A signal will be able to evolve through the system as long as it is able to find a connected path of above-threshold regions. When the system is either driven at random or started from a random initial state, regions that are able to transmit a signal will form some kind of random network. This network is correlated by the interaction of the internal dynamics with the external field. The complicated interrelation between the two driving dynamics means that a complex, finely-balanced system is produced. As the system is driven, after this marginally stable selforganised state has been reached, we will see flashes of activity as external perturbations interact with internal drivers to spark off avalanches ( i.e., clusters) of activity through different routes in the system. Bak's assertion is that the structure of this dynamic network is fractal. If the activated clusters consist of fractals of different sizes, then the duration of the induced processes travelling through these fractals will vary greatly. Different timescales of this type lead to what is termed 1/f noise. 1/f noise is a label used to describe a particular form of time correlation in nature. If a time signal fluctuates in a seemingly erratic way, the question is whether the value of the signal at time has any correlation to the signal measured at time ( ).

For a system that is not poised in a critical state and thus not about to change its mode of behaviour, the reaction of the system is described by a characteristic response time and characteristic length of scale over which the perturbation is felt. However, for a critical system, the same perturbation applied at different positions or the same position at different times can lead to a response of any size. The average is not therefore a useful measure of response. The amount of the system involved is a cluster in the spatial dimensions of the system.

We can use the evolution model just described to gain insight into the effect of a Global Information Grid. Imagine such a grid in two dimensions. At each grid point is positioned an element of our force. Each such force element has a "fitness" value corresponding to its ability to evolve and adapt to local circumstances as a function of the information available on the grid. We assume these fitness values are random at first. At each step of the process, we assume that the force element with the smallest fitness is likely to have to adapt fastest to its local environment. In so doing, it will change the fitness values of the units closest to it on the information grid ( i.e., there is local coevolution). Note that these force elements may be separated by large and varying distances in space. With these assumptions, over time the force elements will form clusters of coevolution of the form predicted by the Bak-Sneppen model. In particular, the statistics of emergent cluster size can be predicted mathematically to converge to a power-law.

In natural systems, we can consider the movement of a boundary through a medium (for example, the boundary of an atomic surface, the boundary of a growing cluster of bacteria, or the front of advance of a fluid "invasion" of a medium such as a crystalline rock).

What happens if we restrict ourselves to looking at the boundary between two different regimes (such as two different nationalities or two opposing armed forces), and how this would move over time depending on the local coevolution of the elements involved?

The most relevant case from our point of view is the front of advance of fluid "invasion" of a medium. As described in [9], we can represent the medium itself as consisting of a lattice of cells, each with either a 1 or 0 in it. A "1" represents the fact that that cell can be wetted. The proportion of cells containing a "1" is defined as p. For large configurations, we can also interpret p as the probability that a particular cell contains a "1." A "0" represents the fact that the cell cannot be wetted–it thus "pins" the advance of the fluid through the medium, at least locally.

It turns out that for this case, when the pinning probability p is greater than a critical value pc, the growth of the interface is halted by a spanning path of pinning cells. Such models of interface or boundary movement exhibit fractal properties of the interface, as discussed in detail in [9]. We shall see similar effects later in our discussion in Chapter 4 of the control of the battlespace using ideas based on preventing the flow of opposing forces and/or third parties through the space. Rather than choosing the next cell to invade at random, as in the DPD model, we can use a model of the process that is more akin to the manoeuverist principle of applying your strength where the opponent is weak–in other words, the cell next to be wetted is the one where the local pinning force of the medium is weakest. Such a model of the boundary movement is the Invasion Percolation model.

In natural systems, the boundary of such an interface that is moving through a medium can be characterised by its "roughness."

For many natural systems, the roughness first goes through a transition period before stabilising at an equilibrium value.

The concept of pinning a fluid locally is similar to the idea of trying to exert local control over a boundary to prevent the flow of other forces or third parties across that boundary. We will see later (in Chapter 4) that the idea of control as the prevention of such flows through an area has important implications for the emergent behaviour of a force (or two competing forces) attempting to exert control over a battlespace.

In the case of control along a boundary, Complexity Theory, in terms of the invasion percolation model, can be used to analyse the effect of two forces (an attack and a defence force) interacting across a boundary, when the boundary moves at the point where the defending (pinning) force is weakest. If the defence pinning force is coevolving locally, then the boundary should form a fractal with a fractal dimension in the range 1.33-1.89 [6, Appendix], as we have seen. In Chapter 3, we show that there is historical evidence in warfare for such an effect, and for values in this range.

Brownian motion is also associated with scaling relationships and fractal behaviour. As a nonfractal object is magnified, no new features are revealed. As a fractal object is magnified, finer details are revealed. The size of the smallest feature of a nonfractal object is called the characteristic scale. A measurement made at finer resolution will include more of these smaller pieces. Thus the value measured of a property will depend upon the resolution used to make the measurement. How a measured property depends on the resolution used to make the measurement is called the scaling relationship. A fractal object has features over a broad range of sizes. Fractal phenomenological characteristics are:

1. SELF-SIMILARITY: behavioural characteristics are "similar" at different resolutions.
2. SCALING: the value measured for a property depends upon the resolution at which it is measured.
3. DIMENSION: the dimension of an object gives a quantitative measure of self-similarity and scaling. It tells us how many new pieces of an object are revealed as it is viewed at higher magnification.
4. NONSTATISTICAL PROPERTIES may be observed. Moments may be zero or nonfinite (e.g., the mean tends towards zero and variance tends towards infinity).

There are two types of self-similarity:
1. GEOMETRICAL: pieces of the object are exact smaller copies of the whole object.
2. STATISTICAL: the value of the statistical property Q(r) measured at resolution r is proportional to the value of Q(ar) measured at a resolution ar such that Q(ar) = kQ(r).


What is of particular interest is that Turner and Weigel's data strongly suggest the occurrence of temporal clustering. Over the 1928-1989 period, 12.5 and 37.5 percent of all extreme positive jumps in the S&P 500 occurred within one and five days respectively of another positive jump in equity prices. Positive jumps in the Dow Jones were similarly clustered with 11.3 percent of the positive jumps taking place within one day, and 36.2 percent transpiring within 5 days of each other.

From our analysis of these open and dissipative systems, it is clear that there are a number of key properties of complexity that are important to our consideration of the nature of future warfare. Such futures, involving the exploitation of loosely coupled command systems such as Network Centric Warfare, will have to take account of these key properties. A list of these is given here, and then discussed further in Chapter 2 in the context of Network Centric Warfare.

1. NONLINEAR INTERACTION: this can give rise to surprising and non-intuitive behaviour, on the basis of simple local coevolution.
2. DECENTRALISED CONTROL: the natural systems we have considered, such as the coevolution of an ecosystem or the movement of a fluid front through a crystalline structure, are not controlled centrally. The emergent behaviour is generated through local coevolution.
3. SELF-ORGANISATION: we have seen how such natural systems can evolve over time to an attractor corresponding to a special state of the system, without the need for guidance from outside the system.
4. NONEQUILIBRIUM ORDER: the order (for example, the space and time correlations) inherent in an open, dissipative system far from equilibrium.
5. ADAPTATION: we have seen how such systems are constantly adapting–clusters or avalanches of local interaction are constantly being created and dissolved across the system. These correspond to correlation effects in space and time, rather a top-down imposition of large-scale coincidences in space and time.
6. COLLECTIVIST DYNAMICS: the ability of elements to locally influence each other, and for these effects to ripple through the system, allows continual feedback between the evolving states of the elements of the system.

Chapter 2

Network Centric Warfare is an emerging theory of war based on the concepts of nonlinearity, complexity, and chaos. It is less deterministic and more emergent; it has less focus on the physical than the behavioural; and it has less focus on things than on relationships.

Combat is, by its nature, a complex activity. Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety...which emerged from the theoretical consideration of general systems as part of Cybernetics, indicates that to properly control such a system, the variety of the controller (the number of accessible states which it can occupy) must match the variety of the combat system itself. The control system itself, in other words, has to be complex. Some previous attempts at representing C2 in combat models have taken the view that this must inevitably lead to extremely complex models. However, recent developments in Complexity Theory...indicate another way forward. The essential idea is that a number of interacting units, behaving under small numbers of simple rules or algorithms, can generate extremely complex behaviour, corresponding to an extremely large number of accessible states, or a high variety configuration, in Cybernetic terms. It follows that, if we choose these simple interactions carefully, the resultant representation of C2 will be sufficient to control, in an acceptable way, the underlying combat model. As part of this careful choice, we need to ensure that the potentially chaotic behaviour generated by the interaction of these simple rules is 'damped' by a top-down C2 structure which remains focused on the overall, high level, campaign objectives.... It follows, from what we have just said, that the representation of the C2 process must reflect two different mechanisms. The first is the lower-level interaction of simple rules or algorithms, which generate the required system variety. The second is the need to damp these by a top-down C2 process focused on campaign objectives. Each of these has to be capable of being represented using the same Generic HQ/Command Agent object architecture. We have chosen to do this by following the general psychological structure of Rasmussen's Ladder, as a schema for the decisionmaking process. At the lower levels of command (below about Corps, and equivalent in other environments), this will consist of a stimulus/response mechanism. In cybernetic terms, this is feedback control. At the higher level, a broader (cognitive-based) review of the options available to change the current campaign plan (if necessary) will be carried out. In cybernetic terms, this is feedforward control since it involves the use of a 'model' ( i.e., a model within our model) to predict the effects of a particular system change.

Modelling and analysis to determine the effect of such phenomena underpin our thinking about such future conflict, the representation of information and command being at their heart. A new approach to capturing these effects has been put forward in this book, and is having a significant influence on the approach to modelling these phenomena. However, capturing the process of intelligent agents in conflict, set within a widely divergent set of possible futures, leads to a rich set of possible trajectories of system evolution for analysis to consider. We thus need to complement this effort with other work to categorise and understand the classes of behaviours which might emerge from such a complex situation. This is the domain of Complexity Theory.


COMPLEXITY CONCEPT INFORMATION AGE FORCE
1. Nonlinear interaction -- Combat forces composed of a large number of nonlinearly interacting parts.
2. Decentralised Control -- There is no master "oracle" dictating the actions of each and every combatant.
3. Self-Organization -- Local action, which often appears "chaotic," induces long-range order.
4. Nonequilibrium Order -- Military conflicts, by their nature, proceed far from equilibrium. Correlation of local effects is key.
5. Adaptation -- Combat forces must continually adapt and coevolve in a changing environment.
6. Collectivist Dynamics -- There is a continual feedback between the behaviour of combatants and the command structure.

Complexity is therefore associated with the intricate intertwining or inter-connectivity of elements within a system and between a system and its environment. In a human system, connectivity means that a decision or action by any individual (group, organisation, institution, or human system) will affect all other related individuals and systems. That effect will not have equal or uniform impact, and will vary with the state of each related individual and system at that time. The state of an individual and system will include its history and its constitution, which in turn will include its organisation and structure. Connectivity applies to the interrelatedness of individuals within a system, as well as to the relatedness between human social systems, which include systems of artifacts such as information systems and intellectual systems of ideas.

The phenomenological definition of a complex system is that it exhibits nonlinear, emergent, adaptive behaviour. Nonlinear behaviour is associated with far-from-equilibrium, open systems, in that cause and effect are no longer linearly connected. This is ultimately due to the type of internal-external system interactions (feedback) affecting our system.

Self-organisation in this context is taken to mean the coming together of a group of individuals to perform a particular task. A feature of these groups is that they are informal and often temporary. Enabling self-organisation can often be a source of innovation. Military commanders who understand the nature of auftragstaktik have always understood this.

In systems where the dynamical evolution is a struggle against various types of thresholds or barriers, the action will predominately occur where the net barrier to change is the smallest.

The species with the lowest fitness coevolves first. Similarly, in considering the movement of a fluid through a medium, the boundary moves where the pinning force is smallest.

Forest Fire: The rate (which is [1-p] if each iteration of the process is counted as a unit of time) of sparks dropping onto the grid is termed the sparking frequency. This sparking frequency sp is a key driver of the dynamics of the forest ecosystem. If sp is small, very large clusters of trees are allowed to form, which span the entire grid. When a spark is then dropped, the forest fire wipes out an entire forest stretching from one side of the grid to the other. In Complexity Theory, this is known as snapping noise. This name comes from looking at the behaviour of the system over time–large spikes of tree extinction (forest fires) are created at isolated points in time. If the sparking frequency sp is very large, then tree clusters do not have the chance to grow. Thus, over time, the system produces a large number of small spikes of activity, which are called popping noise. When sp is in the intermediate regime, the system self-organises to a critical state where the clusters of burnt trees have a distribution represented by a power law, and clusters of all sizes can be created. Over time, the spikes produced by this process ( i.e., the time evolution of forest fires of various sizes) have a similar dynamic to that produced by the acoustic dynamics of crumpling paper, and so this regime is termed crackling noise.

It is possible to relate such self-organised behaviour of a forest fire model to the statistics of the scale and intensity of conflicts. This is the beginning of an explanation as to why casualties in war follow a power law distribution.

A war must begin in a manner similar to the ignition of a forest. One country may invade another country, or a prominent politician may be assassinated. The war will then spread over the contiguous region of metastable countries.

Tuning can be seen as a directive way for the macrosystem to attempt to influence the behaviour of the microsystem. A controlling intelligence is deemed to be necessary in order to guide the system towards a particular goal. Varying the tuning parameter (the sparking frequency) of the forest fire model represents intervention from outside the system in order to ensure that it heads towards a particular goal. This question of tuning makes us consider the boundaries of the systems we are examining, and the flux of energy and/or information across the system boundary.

In such open dissipative systems, there will always be fluxes of information and/or energy across the system boundary.

Chapter 3

LTG Sir Francis Tuker indicated that at a threedimensional spatial level, manoeuvre warfare is determined by three conditions:

1. Flanks shall be tactically open or it shall be possible to create a flank by break-in and breakthrough.
2. The mobile arm shall be predominant.
3. It shall be possible to administer the mobile arm to the point where it will decide the battle and gain decisive victory.

In an historical analysis study [7] of the operational level of combat, it was found by Rowland that the occurrence of breakthrough, defined as the destruction of cohesiveness of the defence, was an important event in the eventual success of an offence. Following breakthrough, 86% of operations were successful, whereas if no breakthrough was achieved only 15% were eventually successful. Once breakthrough has been achieved, it becomes possible for the attack force to conduct a type of operation more in the nature of exploitation than combat. Moreover, variations in the time to breakthrough also led to differences in the nature of campaigns.

Immediate breakthroughs actually had a larger failure rate because of the brittleness that pertains to these very quick breakthrough cases.

This process of irruption has been identified as one of the key emergent effects of manoeuvre warfare [8]. We consider now whether such a process has scaling properties of the type discussed in our general consideration of complexity. The historical data indicates (as we have discussed) that for a given type of breakthrough (immediate, quick, or prolonged– I, Q , or P), and subsequent effect on the campaign (Subsequent Success [SS] or Subsequent Failure[SF]), the mean advance at breakthrough turns out to be a log-normal distribution. Of even more interest to us is the fact that if these distributions are plotted for each of the breakthrough/campaign effect categories, then they have a certain scaling character.

The idea is that an essentially straight line frontage between two tactical-level opponents will buckle into a fractal shape, whose fractal dimension can be calculated as a function of the force ratio of the forces involved (the number of attackers to the number of defenders) as derived from Historical Analysis of infantry battles carried out by the UK Dstl.

Lauren was able to show that the combat front will buckle over time and in the limit will have a fractal dimension D = 1.685. From Chapter 1, if we assume that this process is akin to invasion percolation of one fluid by another in a porous medium, the fractal dimension of the boundary of the resulting interface should lie in the range 1.33-1.89, which is what we find from historical data.

It reflects the asymmetry of the infantry battle in the following sense [12]. The attack force aim is to close on the defence position, and fire is used in a general suppressive mode–actual casualties caused to the defence are only a small part of the process at this point. However, from the defence perspective, the aim is to deter the attack, and casualties to the attack force are very important. Such casualties to the attack force are a direct reflection of the intervisibility of targets to the defence force as discussed above.

There is a power-law relationship between the intensity of war and its frequency.

Chapter 4.

Recent work by Perry [9] has exploited the idea of information entropy to address the second question (with a reduction in entropy across the network corresponding to an increase in knowledge, and this then being equivalent to a reduction in delay in prosecuting an action).

A dynamic process is said to be memoryless or Markovian if at each cycle, the state of the system is influenced only by the state of the system in the previous cycle, and not by the specific history of the system.

We draw on information science to develop a knowledge metric that is a function of the average information present in the set of all possible uncertain events. This quantity is referred to as information entropy and it measures the amount of uncertainty in a probability distribution. The amount of information available from the known occurrence of the event, U = u, i.e. that u enemy units are indeed arrayed against the friendly force, is inversely proportional to the likelihood that the event will occur. An event that is very likely to occur provides little information when it does occur. On the other hand, an unlikely event provides considerable information when it occurs.

Information entropy has properties that make it ideal as a metric for measuring the commander's uncertainty prior to making a decision and for measuring the uncertainty in the entire campaign:

1. MAXIMUM ENTROPY: The entropy function is maximised when the uncertainty in the distribution is greatest. Maximum uncertainty occurs when the friendly commander has no sensor assets to deploy. In this case, any number of units might be arrayed against him with equal probability...the more units available to the enemy commander, the less clear we are about their deployment in the absence of sensor outputs. In general, a probability distribution with a wide variance exhibits high entropy.

This network-enabled approach thus allows us to compute the distribution of the response time of the system as a function of the network assumptions. As we increase the collaboration throughout the network in going from platform-centric to network-centric to futuristic network-centric (to use the RAND categories), so the positive effects of enhanced collaboration have to balance off against the downside effects of information overload and increasing network complexity. Going back to the discussion in Chapter 2 on the Conceptual Framework of Complexity, we can call this overall assessed performance of the network the plecticity of the network, since it characterises the combined positive and negative effects of network complexity and collaboration.

There are two ways to define a cluster of agents. The first, and most usual, is to define neighbouring agents only by those that are north, south, east, or west adjacent to the agent in question, known as nearest neighbour clustering. The second (and although most intuitive, less used) definition is to include all eight neighbours of the central agent as part of a cluster, as shown in Figure 5.2, which is known as next nearest neighbour clustering.

Moby Dick Part One

Excerpts (Part One) from Moby Dick by Herman Melville:

"Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck."

"There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable willfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance."

"That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of the valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars."

"Least of all, did Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear, sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!"

"So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come."

"All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad."

"Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing."

"His special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object."

"But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound."

"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick."

"Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea."

"The incompetence of mere unaided virtue, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness."

"Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell, but God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature."

"A white flag hung out from a craven soul."

"Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright."

"And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"

"The mind does not exist unless leagued with soul."

"God help the, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates."

"Perils abound when wandering in the heart of unknown regions."

"You do not yet have a fixed, vivid conception of those perils."

"To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order."

"The full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn in the obscure background, be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it. Few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action."

"They live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness."

"The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man is sordidness. Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object--that final and romantic object, too many would have turned from in disgust."

"The impulsive, indifferent sword of the barbarians..."

"Chance, free will, and necessity--no wise incompatible--all interweavingly work together. Chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events."

"It took off the extreme edge of their wonder."

"There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair."

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own."

"I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost."

"So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest of the fight."

"In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale."

"In the case of Pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude."

"Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours--watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significant his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he had a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it."

"...strange perplexity of inert irresolution..."

"For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb."

"But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side."

"And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."

"Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety."

"Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets."

"I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it."

"II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it."

"What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish."

"What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?"

"And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law."

"The substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except--but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is."

"The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.
Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."

"I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally."

"But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern."

"Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;--not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon."

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness."

Feynman Lecture One

Here is a link to four Richard Feynman online lectures, and below are notes and an index for the first lecture:

Quantum electrodynamics, "our pride and joy"

Theoretical history of physics is synthesis: laws of motion became theory that explained heat, explained sound as motion of atoms and waves in gas; also the forces between large masses (gravity).

New theory of light, electromagnetic wave...

Rutherford determined that matter consisted of individual atoms, which had tiny cores that were heavy and electrons that traveled around them. if one used newton's theory of gravity to explain why the electrons orbited the nucleus, some things could be explained, but as the theory got more developed, it became apparent that newton's theory as applied to the atom couldn't explain most of the phenomena that we can observe.

When the quantum laws of motion were applied to the electron, it was a tremendous success.

Checker board analogy: it isn't the difficulty of the rules, the rules are simple. it is the multiplicity of its action and interconnection. corner of board, where interactions are simpler, one can predict almost exactly.

If the atom is 100 kilometers, we're measuring at 1cm.

Min. 21-23, the difficulty of understanding. the fun of it is that it is so mysterious. explanation of difficulty, 23-26 (great stuff).

mayan indian analogies 26:30

arithmetic 29:00 and mathematics 31:00

the difficulty of understanding thing in itself, understanding 'why', 31:30.

mayan's reduced to three books,priests burned hundreds of thousands, 32:45

useless to make philosophical arguments about 'why', modern science, 33:45

monchromatic light, light is corpuscular, it is a particle...

probability in light, 42:30, light doesn't see anything on a small scale, 45:50,

can't line light up, 46:50, reduced to probability, 47:20,

nature is cleverer than you are, 48:20,

colors in oil and soap bubbles, reflection between to surfaces 50:05,

bands of reflections, 51:30

newton's rings, 52:40 - 55, interference, 55:15, how does that happen with the odds of photon particle?

the answer of arrows 58:00, crazy, unexplainable, but it works...

probability of an event is the square (area) of an amplitude (an arrow on a plane).

question session is worthwhile, 1:08:30.

The God Particle

Excerpts from the book, God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? by Leon Lederman:

"We have absolutely no data on the beginning of the universe. None, zero. We don't know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billionth of a trillionth of a second."

"In the beginning, there was a void. And then the nothingness exploded."

"Right after the Big Bang, space and time boiled and foamed as black holes formed and dissolved."

"The Greek philosopher Democritus called the smallest unit of existence the atomos ."

"At the beginning of the universe there was no complex matter like we know it today. This is because the searing heat of the early universe did not allow the formation of composite objects; such objects, if formed by transient collisions, would be instantly decomposed into their most primitive constituents. There was perhaps one kind of particle and one force -- or even a unified particle/force -- and the laws of physics. "

"Metaphor for the physics of fundamental particles: Suppose we are given the task of discovering the most basic elements of a library. What would we do? First, we might think of books in their various subject categories: history, science, biography. Or perhaps we would organize them by size: thick, thin, tall, short. After considering many such diversions we realize that books are complex objects that can be readily subdivided. So we look inside. Chapters, paragraphs, and sentences are quickly dismissed as inelegant and complex constituents. Words! Here we recall that on a table near the entrance there is a fat catalogue of all the words in the library--the dictionary. By following certain rules of behavior, which we call grammar, we can use the dictionary words to compose all the books in the library. But there are so many words. Further reflection would lead us to letters, since words are 'cuttable.' Now we have it! Twenty-six letters can make the tens of thousands of words, and they can in turn make the millions (billions?) of books. Now we must introduce an additional set of rules: spelling, to constrain the combinations of letters. Without the intercession of a very young critic we might publish our discovery prematurely. A young critic would say, smugly, no doubt, "You don't need twenty-six letters, Grandpa. All you need is a zero and a one." Now if it makes no sense to take apart the 0 or the 1, we have discovered the primordial, a-tomic components of the library."

"In an accelerator, the 'debris' from a collision between a proton and an antiproton is captured electronically by a three-story-tall, $60 million detector. Here, the evidence, the "seeing", is tens of thousands of sensors that develop an electrical impulse as a particle passes. All of these impulses are fed through hundreds of thousands of wires to electronic data processors. The hot collision can generate as many as seventy particles, each of which can be "captured" by various sections of the detector."

"Thomas Huxley, 'The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful belief by an ugly fact.'"

"Theorists tend to be arrogant. During...I solemnly cautioned our theory group against arrogance. At least one took me seriously. I'll never forget the prayer I overheard emanating from him, 'Dear Lord, forgive me the sin of arrogance, and Lord, by arrogance I mean the following...'"

"Since we are using numbers that are either very large or very small, we use scientific notation. For instance, instead of writing one million as 1,000,000, we write it like this 10^6. That means 1 followed by 6 zeros, which is the approximate cost of running the US government for about 20 seconds. The universe is 10^18 seconds old. 10^7 seconds is about four months, 10 ^9 is about thirdy years. The smallest unit of measurement today is about 10^-17 cm, which is the distance a Z^0 (zee zero) can travel before it departs our world. The size of a superstring is 10^-35 cm. The radius of the universe is about 10^28 cm."

"My dream was to live to see all of physics reduced to an elegant formula that could fit on a t-shirt."

The Mysterious Mr. Higgs
"There is one thing standing in the way of such a t-shirt ending for physics, one villain who refuses to be caught. And what a villain! The biggest villain of all time! There is, we believe, a wraith-like presence throughout the universe that is keeping us from understanding the true nature of matter. This invisible barrier that keeps us from knowing the truth is call the Higgs field. Its tentacles reach into every corner of the universe, and its scientific and philosophical implications raise large goose bumps on the skin of a physicist. The Higgs field works its black magic through--what else?--a particle. This particle is called the Higgs boson."

"The Higgs boson is the primary reason for building the Super Collider. Only the SSC will have the energy necessary to produce and detect the Higgs boson. The boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that i have given it a nickname: the God Particle. Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one..."

"Electrons are particles of matter. They belong to the lepton family. Quarks and leptons make up matter (six of each type, six flavors). Photons, gluons, W's, Z's, and gravitons make up the forces. The quark is point-like. It has no dimesion, and therefore no shape. It is a mathematical point, and therefore the issue of solidity is moot. The apparent solidity of matter depends on the details of how quarks combine with one another." [Me: Irreducible points, like a Cantor set or Sierpinski Triangle.]

"There is a strong force between quarks, a very curious kind of force that behaves very differently from the electrical forces. This force is composed of gluons. Gauge bosons carry information about the force from particle A to particle B and back again to A. Gauge bosons are force carriers, mediators of the force which determine behavior. Photons carry the electromagnetic force. The strong force is carried by zero-mass gluons, and have an infinite reach; the weak force is carried by W and Z heavy-particles, and have a short reach; gravitons carry gravity, but we don't know anything about them. Quarks are building blocks of a large class of objects called hadrons. That's the greek word for 'heavy'. It takes three quarks to make a proton, itself a type of hadron. "

"There are twelve basic particles of matter, six quarks, six leptons. "

"But the trick is to get down to one a-tom, one fundamental unit that cannot be further cut. That is where the particle accelerator comes in."

"The problem is that, even though the quarks are all point-like, dimensionless, they have mass. They shouldn't. The sensible theories predicted they wouldn't, but they do."

"We suspect the mass comes from a field called the Higgs field. It pervades all of space, the Apeiron, cluttering up the void, tugging on points, making them heavy. The field is represented by a particle called the Higgs boson. We haven't found it yet. It exists only in our math. "

"Why do we think it exists? Because it has to exist. The quarks, the leptons, the four known forces--none of these make sense unless there is a massive field distorting what we see, skewing our experimental results. If we don't find it, everything crumbles. Our theories, our standard model, all if it will be next to worthless. "

"The SSC is built to go after the Higgs field, to capture the Higgs particle. What evidence do we have that it exists? None so far, zero. In fact, outside of pure reason, the evidence would convince most sensible physicists that it doesn't exist."

"When we collide these particles, they will release about 4 billion tetravolts, TeV, which is a little less than the energy released when you strike a match. However, this energy will be concentrated in a few particles, not 10^21 atoms like a match."

"How does the accelerator work? One, phase stability, which error corrects for the trajectory of a particle. Two, strong focusing, which provides stable acceleration, involves shaping the magnetic fields that guide the particles so that they are held much closer to an ideal orbit where the oscillations are kept to tiny amplitudes around the ideal orbit. This allowed the accelerator to get bigger. The third breakthrough was cascade acceleration, where it is inefficient to do high energy with one machine. This uses a sequence of accelerators, each optimized for a particular energy interval. These are like gears on a sports car. The fourth breakthrough was superconductivity. It was discovered that at extremely low temperatures, certain metals lost all resistance to electricity. A loop of wire at that temperature would carry a current forever with no use of energy. To get this temperature, we use liquid Helium, which is a true liquid at 5 degrees above Abs. Zero (everything else solidifies at this temp) to cool wires made of special alloys."

"The anti-proton (p-bars) are focused into a magnetic ring called the debuncher ring, where they are processed, organized, and compressed, then transferred to the accumulator ring. Storage is a delicate affair, because when antimatter comes into contact with matter--they annihilate each other. On milligram of antiprotons would contain about as much energy as two tons of oil, but it would take about a few million years at the present rate to produce that much."

"Because of their volatility, the p-bars must be kept orbiting extremely close to the center of the vacuum tube. The quality of the vacuum must be extraordinary--the best nothing that money can buy."

"After accumulation and compression, which takes ten hours, we are ready to inject the p-bars back into the accelerator. A tense countdown ensues to make sure that every voltage every current, every magnet, and every switch is correct. The p-bars are zapped into the main ring, where they circulate counterclockwise because of their negative charge. They are accelerated to a certain speed, then put into the Tevatron collider, where the protons are waiting, circulating clockwise. Both proton and p-bar beams are accelerated further. The final step is the "squeeze." "Squeeze" energizes special superconducting quadrupole magnets that compress beam diameters from soda straws to human hairs. This increases the density, and collision is ensured."

"Accelerators are the largest machines our civilization has ever built. They are our pyramids."

"Quarks have asymptotic freedom. The closer one quark is to another, the weaker the strong force. The farther away, the stronger. This means that there are no such thing as free quarks. Close together, they are almost free."

The God Particle at Last
"In the influence of the Higgs field, all particles suckle energy and absorb this energy and become massive. Once a particle has mass, it travels at less than the speed of light. The Higgs breaks the symmetry of nothingness by creating differences, generating strangeness, and hiding unity. Mass is not an intrinsic property of particles, but a property acquired by the interaction of particles and their environment. The Higgs is a spin-zero boson. Spin implies directionality in space, but the Higgs field exists at every location with no directionality. "In the beginning there was a Higgs field." The immense potential energy of the Higgs field created a "false vacuum" in the beginning, and the transition to a true vacuum released this energy to create particles and radiation, and to drive inflation, which is the increase in the difference between nothing and something, all at the enormous temperature of the beginning."

"Having donated all of its energy to the creation of particles, the Higgs field retires temporarily, reappearing later to supervise the increasing complexity as the forces and particles continued to differentiate. [Me: And on the seventh day...] Inflation separated the close regions of space into causally disconnected regions."

"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. "

Sociobiology

By E.O. Wilson (excerpts):

"Manipulation of the physical environment is the ultimate adaptation...Social adaptations, by virtue of their great power and sophistication, have achieved the highest degree of modification." [Me: Adaptation qua information processing]

"The hypothesis to consider, then, is that genes promoting flexibility in social behavior are strongly selected at the individual level...In order to generate the amount of variation actually observed to occur, it is necessary for there to be multiple adaptive peaks. In other words, different forms of society within the same species must be nearly enough alike in survival ability for many to enjoy long tenure."

"The alternative, found in some social insects, is flexibility in individual behavior and caste development, which nevertheless results in an approach toward uniformity in the statistical distribution of the kinds of individuals when all individuals within the colony are taken together...When one colony with its hundreds or thousands of members is compared with another of the same species, the statistical patterns of activity are about the same. We know that some of this consistency is due to negative feedback. As one requirement such as brood care or nest repair intensifies, workers shift their activities to compensate until the need is met, then change back again [me: shades of the greatest generation?]. Experiments have shown that disruptions of the feedback loops, and thence deviation by the colony from the statistical norms, can be disastrous [me: what happens when the military draft is deemed verboten?]."

"The controls governing human societies are not nearly so strong, and the effects of deviation are not so dangerous. The anthropological literature abounds with examples of societies that contain obvious inefficiencies and even pathological flaws--yet endure [me: is the selective process more rigorous nowadays; aren't inefficiencies tolerated less than they used to be?]...The explanation may be a lack of competition from other species, resulting in what biologists call ecological release."

"Moderately high heritability has been documented in introversion-extroversion, personal tempo, psychomotor and sports activities, neuroticism, dominance, depression, age of first sexual activity, timing of major cognitive development, and the tendency toward certain forms of mental illness such as schizophrenia. Even a small portion of this variance invested in population differences might predispose societies toward cultural differences."

"Sharing is rare among the nonhuman primates...But in man it is one of the strongest social traits, reaching levels that match the intense trophalactic exchanges of termites and ants. As a result only man has an economy. High intelligence and symbolizing ability make true barter possible. Intelligence also permits the exchanges to be stretched out in time, converting them into acts of reciprocal altruism. Money...is a quantification of reciprocal altruism."

"The microstructure of human social organization is based on sophisticated mutual assessments that lead to the making of contracts. As Erving Goffman correctly perceived, a stranger is rapidly but politely explored to determine his socioeconomic status, intelligence and education, self-perception, social attitudes, competence, trustworthiness, and emotional stability...The presentation of the self can be expected to contain deceptive elements."

"Deception and hypocrisy are neither absolute evils that virtuous men suppress to a minimum level nor residual animal traits waiting to be erased by further social evolution. They are very human devices for conducting the complex daily business of social life. The level [of deception and hypocrisy] in each particular society may represent a compromise that reflects the size and complexity of the society. If the level is too low, others will seize the advantage and win. Complete honesty on all sides is not the answer. The old primate frankness would destroy the delicate fabric of social life that has built up in human populations beyond the limits of the immediate clan. As Louis J. Halle correctly observed, good manners have become a substitute for love."

"Sexual behavior has been largely dissociated from the act of fertilization. It is ironic that religionists who forbid sexual activity except for purposes of procreation should do so on the basis of 'natural law.' Theirs is a misguided effort in comparative ethology, based on the incorrect assumption that in reproduction man is essentially like other animals."

"Human societies have effloresced to levels of extreme complexity because their members have the intelligence and flexibility to play roles of virtually any degree of specification, and to switch them as the occasion demands."

"The hereditary factors of human success are strongly polygenic and form a long list, only a few of which have been measured...Under these circumstances only the most intense forms of disruptive selection could result in the formation of stable ensembles of genes. A much more likely circumstance is the one that apparently prevails: the maintenance of a large amount of genetic diversity within societies and the loose correlation of some of the genetically determined traits with success."

"Ethnographic detail is genetically underprescribed, resulting in great amounts of diversity among societies."

"Culture, including the more resplendent manifestations of ritual and religion, can be interpreted as a hierarchical system of environmental tracking devices...To the extent that the specific details of culture are nongenetic, they can be decoupled from the biological system and arrayed beside it as an auxiliary system...Among the fastest cultural responses in industrial civilizations are fashions in dress and speech. Somewhat slower are political ideology and social attitudes toward other nations, while the slowest of all include incest taboos and the belief or disbelief in particular high gods."

"Slowly changing forms of culture tend to be encapsulated in ritual...The sacred rituals are the most distinctively human. Their most elementary forms are concerned with magic, the active attempt to manipulate nature and the gods...based the quite logical notion that what is done with an image [or effigy] will come to pass with the real thing. This anticipatory action is comparable to the intention movements of animals, which int he course of evolution have often been ritualized into communicative signals. The waggle dance of the honeybee, it will be recalled, is a miniaturized rehearsal of the flight from the nest to the food."

"It is a reasonable hypothesis that magic and totemism constituted direct adaptations to the environment and preceded formal religion in social evolutions. Sacred traditions occur almost universally in human societies. So do myths that explain the origin of man or at the very least the relation of the tribe to the rest of the world. But belief in high gods is not universal...The concept of an active, moral God who created the world is even less widespread. Furthermore, this concept most commonly arises with a pastoral way of life. The greater the dependence on herding, the more likely the belief in a shepherd god of the Judaeo-Christian model. In other kinds of societies, the belief occurs in 10 percent of the cases."

"The enduring paradox of religion is that so much of its substance is demonstrably false, yet it remains a driving force in all societies. Men would rather believe than know, have the void as purpose, as Nietzsche said, than be void of purpose."

"To sanctify a procedure or a statement is to certify it as beyond question and imply punishment for anyone who dares to contradict it."

"The extreme plasticity of human social behavior is both a great strength and a real danger. If each family worked out rules of behavior on its own, the result would be an intolerable amount of tradition drift and growing chaos. To counteract selfish behavior and the 'dissolving power' of high intelligence, each society must codify itself. Within broad limits virtually an set of conventions works better than none at all. Because arbitrary codes work, organizations tend to be inefficient and marred by unnecessary inequities. As Rappaport succinctly expressed it, 'Sanctification transforms the arbitrary into the necessary, and regulatory mechanisms which are arbitrary are likely to be sanctified.' Reform meets repression, because to the extent that the rules have been sanctified and mythologized, the majority of the people regard them as beyond question, and disagreement is defined as blasphemy."

"The Achilles heel of the [ethical] intuitionist position [e.g. Rawls] is that it relies on the emotive judgment of the brain as though that organ must be treated as a black box [ethical intuitionism--the belief that the mind has a direct awareness of true right and wrong that it can formalize by logic and translate into rules of social action]...the human genotype and the ecosystem in which it evolved were fashioned out of extreme unfairness. "

"Moral ambivalency will be further intensified by the circumstance that a schedule of sex- and age-dependent ethics can impart higher genetic fitness than a single moral code which is applied uniformly to all sex-age groups. For example, it should be of selective advantage for young children to be self-centered and relatively disinclined to perform altruistic acts based on personal principles. Similarly, adolescents should be more tightly bound by age-peer bonds within their own sex and hence unusually sensitive to peer approval. The reason is that at this time greater advantage accrues to the formation of alliances and rise in status than later, when sexual and parental morality become the paramount determinants of fitness."

Kohlberg stages of moral development:
Moral value is defined by punishment and reward.
1. Obedience to rules and authority to avoid punishment.
2. Conformity to obtain rewards and to exchange favors.

Moral value resides in filling the correct roles, in maintaining order and meeting the expectations of others.
3. Good-boy orientation: conformity to avoid dislike and rejection by others.
4. Duty orientation: conformity to avoid censure by authority, disruption of order, and resulting guilt.

Moral value resides in conformity to shared standards, rights, and duties.
5. Legalistic orientation: recognition of the value of contracts, some arbitrariness in rule formation to maintain common good.
6. Conscience or principle orientation: primary allegiance to principles of choice, which can overrule law in cases where the law is judged to do more harm than good.

"Richness of information and precise transmission of mood are no less the standards of excellence in human music."

"Part of man's problem is that his intergroup responses are still crude and primitive, and inadequate for the extended extraterritorial relationships that civilization has thrust on him. The unhappy result is what Garrett Hardin (1972) has defined as tribalism in the modern sense:

Any group of people that perceives itself as a distinct group, and which is so perceived by the outside world, may be called a tribe. The group might be a race, as ordinarily defined, but it need not be; it can just as well be a religious sect, a political group, or an occupational group. The essential characteristic of a tribe is that it should follow a double standard of morality--one kind of behavior for in-group relations, another for out-group.

It is one of the unfortunate and inescapable characteristics of tribalism that it eventually evokes counter-tribalism (or, to use a different figure of speech, it 'polarizes' society).

Fearful of the hostile groups around them, the tribe refuses to concede to the common good...Justice and liberty decline. Increases in real and imagined threats congeal the sense of group identity and mobilize the tribal members. Xenophobia becomes a political virtue. The treatment of nonconformists within the group grows harsher. History is replete with the escalation of this process to the point that the society breaks down or goes to war. No nation has been completely immune."

"[The autocatalysis model of human evolution] holds that when the earliest hominids became bipedal as part of their terrestrial adaptation, their hands were freed, the manufacture and handling of artifacts were made easier, and intelligence grew as part of the improvement of the tool-using habit. With mental capacity and the tendency to use artifacts increasing through mutual reinforcement, the entire materials-based culture expanded. Cooperation during hunting was perfected, providing new impetus for the evolution of intelligence, which in turn permitted still more sophistication tool using, and so on through cycles of causation."

"After A.D. 1400 European-based civilization shifted gears again, and knowledge and technology grew not just exponentially but superexponentially...There is no reason to believe that during this final sprint there has been a cessation in the evolution of either mental capacity or the predilection toward special social behaviors. The theory of population genetics and experiments on other organisms show that substantial changes can occur in the span of less than 100 generations, which for man reaches back only to the time of the Roman Empire. Two thousand generations, roughly the period since typical homo sapiens invaded Europe, is enough time to create new species and to mold them in major ways. Although we do not know how much mental evolution has actually occurred, it would be false to assume that modern civilizations have been built entirely on capital accumulated during the long haul of the Pleistocene."

[Me: Might there be some genetic implications in the choice-migration to America of similar-minded persons (risk-taking, individualistic, devout, etc.?--the migration of the intellectuals from Europe during WWII?--the Jews?--are there genetic implications in regional migrations?]

"The network of contacts among individuals and bands must also have grown. We can postulate a critical mass of cultural capacity and network size in which it became advantageous for bands actively to enlarge both. In other words, the feedback became positive."

"By adding the additional postulate of a threshold effect, it is possible to explain why the process [of autocatalytic evolution through warfare] operated exclusively in human evolution. If any social predatory mammal attains a certain level of intelligence, as the early hominids, being large primates, were especially predisposed to do, one band would have the capacity to consciously ponder the significance of adjacent social groups and to deal with them in an intelligent, organized fashion...Such primitive cultural capacity would be permitted by the possession of certain genes. Reciprocally, the cultural capacity might propel the spread of the genes through the genetic constitution of the metapopulation. Once begun, such a mutual reinforcement could be irreversible...By current theory genocide or genosorption strongly favoring the aggressor need take place only once every few generations to direct evolution. This alone could push truly altruistic genes to a high frequency within the bands...Furthermore, it is to be expected that some isolated cultures will escape the process for generations at a time, in effect reverting temporarily to what ethnographers classify as a pacific state [me: see the Britons]."

"Mankind has never stopped evolving, but in a sense his populations are drifting. The effects over a period of a few generations could change the identity of the socioeconomic optima. In particular, the rate of gene flow around the world has risen to dramatic levels and is accelerating, and the mean coefficients of relationship within the local communities are correspondingly diminishing. The result could be an eventual lessening of altruistic behavior through maladaptation and loss of group-selected genes. It was shown earlier that behavioral traits tend to be selected out by the principle of metabolic conservation when they are suppressed or when their original function becomes neutral in adaptive value. Such traits can largely disappear from populations in as few as ten generations, only two or three centuries in the case of human beings. With our present inadequate understanding of the human brain, we do not know how many of the most valued qualities are linked genetically to more obsolete, destructive ones. Cooperativeness toward groupmates might be coupled with aggressivity toward strangers, creativeness with desire to own and dominate, athletic zeal with a tendency to violent response, and so on. In extreme cases such pairings could stem from pleiotropism, the control of more than one phenotypic character by the same set of genes."