Yuri
Tarnopolsky
THE NEW AND THE
DIFFERENT
FOREWORD (2006)
I am publishing
the ten
year old The New and
the Different on
the Web with minimal editing. I completely
realize the awkwardness of its
shape, style, and language. But I
believe it still has something NEW in it.
I tried to express it in the simplest language possible.
My INTRODUCTION to The
New and the Different tells the story of the manuscript. It was my first attempt to formulate a
chemist’s view of the world, stimulated by Ulf Grenander’s Pattern
Theory.
Since 1995, when
the
manuscript was finished, a lot of things
have happened. Ulf Grenander and I
completed History as Points and Lines, I was privileged to
watch Ulf’s
work on Patterns of Thought, the
ashes of 9-11 fell on the fresh page of
history, the Iraq slaughter splashed a bloody Rorschach test on it, and
the
flat world turned out to be dreadfully bumpy for big wheels. Linguistics seemed to me a comforting
distraction.
I see this manuscript as a bulky packet with a few seeds for
a NEW perception of evolving complex
systems (ECS- or X-systems) in which we are destined to live like
fish in
muddy water. Do we really need any new vision of the world? See Chapter
32:
COMPLEXITY AND EVOLUTION. Will the
seeds germinate?
Speaking about
seeds,
the science of Everything is probably
as old as agriculture. The art of
growing plants starts with soil and develops slowly.
Ancient Sumerian dream books were the first publications
on
abstract bonding. The Greeks discovered
atomism—the greatest idea of physics, according to Richard Feynman. Benedict Spinoza suspected that the order of
ideas is the same as the order of things.
Georg Cantor noticed that there was not so much difference
between both. Ulf Grenander gave atomism a
mathematical
form and he surveyed and mapped the entire huge expanse of
Everything.
The soil is ready. More
literature is reviewed in my other e-publications.
My most important
personal discovery since 1995 has been
the realization of the contrast
between the physical theory and a theory of complex
systems. Since the number of
interconnected and well
paid brilliant minds in the world is very high, it can be postulated
that a
lack of progress in some direction for more than 50 years is a proof
that the
direction is an impasse. I believe that
in order to achieve a still lacking understanding of evolving complex
systems we have to abandon the paradigm
of scientific theory that has been serving us flawlessly if applied to well
defined systems. Unaccustomed
to
the concept of novelty, it stumbles on the threshold of evolving
complexity. This is exactly why the atomistic understanding of
Everything
remains a rare intellectual oasis populated with a minimal number of
people:
the visitor has to discard the
equipment with which he or she makes a living.
The central for
Pattern
Theory idea of atomism goes back to
the less mercantile times when philosophers regarded creativity of
intellect
and search for truth as the real meaning of life.
Ideas do not die.
Yuri
Tarnopolsky
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