Essay 25: On Zippers

In Essay 24, On Myself I was looking for a place for myself in the Everything. I took notes of addresses of some possible dwellings, taking complexity as the avenue and size as the street, and making no demands about the architecture.

I am going to use the image of Sisyphus from Essay 23 rolling his stone over the hill, but without Sisyphus. The stone alone will do. I only want to remind that in chemistry change happens because the energy of molecules spreads over a certain interval, so that the most vigorous of them have enough energy to jump to the top of the hill. Others take their place. The molecular "stone" behaves more like a tennis ball.

Change in society, as I see it, happens for the same reason with mostly angry, agitated, and excited (or simply clever) people instead of molecules or due to an individual Sisyphus who manages to push the heavy stone over the hill.

I will use here some animations. They can be viewed by clicking on the link ANIMATE. The BACK button of the browser will bring the page back.

My first animated illustration shows change in a small simple system.

It has a small number of stable states that looks like valleys between the hills, with the height of the hill corresponding to the energy of the transition barrier. The stone goes from valley to valley in any order. All the valleys are about equally deep and all the hills are equally high. We should imagine the picture below as rolled into a cylinder, so that the landscape is continuous and the walk over the landscape is random.
I could make the illustration more realistic but I don't think this would be worth rolling my stone uphill.

Figure 25.1 would be a general case, but in highly ordered systems, like the clockwork, the stone would simply go around in the same sequence.

The second diagram shows change in a large complex system. I start it with an initial state that can be regarded either as a Medium Bang or as a dark place of Genesis, 1:1, "without form" but not quite void. I do not mean here the universe.

Figure 25.2 should not be turned into a cylinder because it evolves by rolling the stone over a changing landscape. There is always a hill ahead, there could be a retreat back, but the stone steadily moves ahead, and the hill ahead is always new, although it can be similar to some hill in the past.

A small complex system, for example, a corporation, evolves in time, but it can also jump between several patterns of functioning, for example, recession, new competitor, merger, spike in demand, major lawsuit, etc. A large complex system, like nation, goes through situations of revolt, crisis, war, legislation shift, etc.
History of France is a remarkable example of almost two century long vacillation between authoritarian and republican systems after the French Revolution, and history of Russia presents a similar example of shifting back and forth from liberalism to iron rule. On a much smaller scale, America shifts between Republican and Democrat governments, with the dynamism of evolution overshadowing the differences.

The general pattern of the terrain can go up or down, and it is an intriguing question on what it depends.

I believe it depends on the production of energy (more accurately, free energy, see Essay 7, On the Smell of Money ) , but I feel not fit to go into particulars of non-equilibrium thermodynamics that are different from those of the classic one.

If the energy of a system goes up, the system becomes less stable and more capable of jumping over the transition barrier. There are two possible situations in a transition: the other side of the hill can be either deeper than the initial one or it could be the opposite. A simple system with just one hill will spend more time in the deeper valley:

The deeper valley is on the left.

ANIMATE Figure 25. 5

The deeper valley is on the right.

ANIMATE Figure 25. 6

The problem is that in a large complex system we never know what is on the other side of the hill. The future is unpredictable. Human mind, however, can list most of the future alternatives as falling into past patterns. It is the pattern that connects the future with the past. Naturally, the future can present a new, never seen pattern.

Those are two types of the roller coasters of change. Our clocks are lucky to ride the circular type, but we, humans, have all the fun of riding the roller coaster that we can comprehend in its entirety only when we are safely off.

One of the possible historical ways to make a rising landscape less steep is to decrease the buildup of energy by humans. It can be done in at least two ways: by decreasing population and/or by decreasing physical movement that requires most physical energy. For example, as an ultimate sci-fi picture, a planet can be populated by something like motionless silicon devices feebly exchanging light signals with each other through a fiber network and producing a new device only with some of them is damaged.

As if to foreshadow the possible future, we call each other and send email instead of meeting in person. Computers consume very little energy. If terrorism or fuel scarcity becomes part of life, people might travel less and less.

There is absolutely no reason to be fatalistic and pessimistic because we can imagine only what falls under known patterns and can never imagine the radically new ones. On the new and the different, see Essay 20, On Artificial Art .

My final question is how a large and complex system can change in a radical way.

Any imaginable small change has a certain probability. A radical change of a big system consists of a large number of small changes. Therefore, the probability of such large change is the product of many fractional numbers, which is a very small number.

The reality is that the small changes do not happen all at once. The change of a large system happens locally and is spread as a sequence of stages over time. I already mentioned the theory of dislocations in Essay 22, On Errors and the similarity of a large deformation to zipper.

It is difficult to separate two parts of a large system with many internal bonds.

The zipper effect has extremely important implications in molecular biology, but this is the knowledge outside the map.

Small systems are vulnerable because their zippers have a small number of teeth.

A big problem arises: what is stronger in a direct clash, fluid democracy or iron autocracy?
I think that the outcome of a military confrontation depends on the strength of the armies, and all the armies are supposed to be iron autocracies.

In a non-military confrontation, I would not bet on liberalism against a violent autocracy. But the autocracy is incomparably more vulnerable than democracy where liberalism is balanced by common sense. Democracy heals its wounds, while autocracy has brittle senile bones.

The twentieth century brought to life a new kind of organization: global network. We do not have enough experience with them. The Communist network broke down after the fall of the Soviet Empire. This may suggest that cutting off the sources of energy and a blow on the head would do the same to a terrorist network.

1. On the story of zipper, see Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts—from Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers—Came to Be . New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

2. Online animations of activation energy, i.e., the height of the transition barrier: