Nature's and Life's Complexity: Time to Learn Non-Linear Thinking!
How far and how well will the human mind be able to cope with life’s complexity?
Scientists and philosophers, like Descartes and Laplace, once thought that the day would come when everything would be described by elementary particles—in the sense of minute material pieces of matter—bouncing around as in a huge billiard. This may not have allowed us to predict everything, but at least it would have been a description of the world reducible to simple elements of matter, sort of like marbles zigzagging all over the place and uncomplicated few elementary processes. The truth of the matter (no pun intended) is that this naïve worldview had to give way to the modern standard model of particle physics, which is one of the most complicated intellectual and mathematical abstract theories the human mind ever conceived. In particle physics, one works with the so-called ‘Lagrangian functional’–an equation that describes the dynamics of a system of particles and its energy states. Below is a snapshot of the full Lagrangian that contains the interactions of the nuclear forces a…
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