Book ChapterDOI
More Is Different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science.
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This article opposes the reductionist hypothesis, arguing that if everything obeys the same fundamental laws, then the only scientists who are studying anything really fundamental are those who are working on those laws.Abstract:
The reductionist hypothesis may still be a topic for controversy among philosophers, but among the great majority of active scientists I think it is accepted without question. The workings of our minds and bodies, and of all the animate or inanimate matter of which we have any detailed knowledge, are assumed to be controlled by the same set of fundamental laws, which except under certain extreme conditions we feel we know pretty well. It seems inevitable to go on uncritically to what appears at first sight to be an obvious corollary of reductionism: that if everything obeys the same fundamental laws, then the only scientists who are studying anything really fundamental are those who are working on those laws. In practice, that amounts to some astrophysicists, some elementary particle physicists, some logicians and other mathematicians, and few others. This point of view, which it is the main purpose of this article to oppose, is expressed in a rather wellknown passage by Weisskopf (1):read more
Citations
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From molecular to modular cell biology.
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Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data
Michael D. Schmidt,Hod Lipson +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a method for automatically searching motion-tracking data captured from various physical systems, ranging from simple harmonic oscillators to chaotic double-pendula, without any prior knowledge about physics, kinematics, or geometry, the algorithm discovered Hamiltonians, Lagrangians, and other laws of geometric and momentum conservation.
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Complexity in Strongly Correlated Electronic Systems
TL;DR: The spontaneous emergence of electronic nanometer-scale structures in transition metal oxides, and the existence of many competing states, are properties often associated with complex matter where nonlinearities dominate, such as soft materials and biological systems.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Quasi-particles and gauge invariance in the theory of superconductivity
TL;DR: In this paper, it was shown that the Meissner effect can be maintained in the quasi-particle picture by taking into account a certain class of corrections to the chargecurrent operator due to the phonon and Coulomb interaction.
Journal ArticleDOI
Random-Phase Approximation in the Theory of Superconductivity
TL;DR: In this paper, a generalization of the random-phase approximation of the theory of Coulomb correlation energy is applied to the superconductivity theory, and it is shown that most elementary excitations have the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer energy gap spectrum, but there are collective excitations also.
Journal ArticleDOI
An Approximate Quantum Theory of the Antiferromagnetic Ground State
TL;DR: In this paper, the ground state energy of the Kramers-Heller theory of ferromagnetic ground states has been investigated and its properties were shown to lie within limits found elsewhere on rigorous grounds.
Journal ArticleDOI
Coherent Excited States in the Theory of Superconductivity: Gauge Invariance and the Meissner Effect
TL;DR: In this article, it was shown that the non-gauge-invariant terms in the Hamiltonian of Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer have an effect on these states which vanishes in the weak coupling limit.
Journal ArticleDOI
Wave propagation in the early stages of aggregation of cellular slime molds.
TL;DR: A detailed theory of the velocity of propagation of the acrasin pulse responsible for the aggregation of some of the cellular slime molds is presented and it is shown that there is a critical density of amebae below which the waves cannot propagate.