> At 07:17 PM 11/22/98 -0500, you wrote:
> >This just in from the American Institute of Physics weekly
> >newsletter. not sure whether to file it under
> >ripley's-believe-it-or-not", science-in-search-of-funding,
> >history-minus-the-participants, or just plain old
> >hmmm-thats-interesting.
> >
> >les schaffer
>
> Why not file it under, that's-probably-true?
Because of a simple observation: there are very few (hundreds at most) examples of arms races. Far too little data to support such abstract models.
This would not be the case if we were dealing with fundamental phenomenae, as in the physicists search for a theory of everything, but when one is attempting to add questionable variables -- "fear," for example, but nothing to do with military-iundustrial elite formations -- well then we're pretty well into "science-in-search-of-funding," and "history-minus-the-participants."
> What we are talking about is not reality but models of reality. It is most
> unlikely that variables covary in a constant rectilinear way. Especially
> not with living entities.
Oh it's absolutely certain. The problem is WAY too many nonlinear variables, and WAY too few data sets. Chaos theory is far too primitive to make sense of this, except as a suggestive hueristic. And I say this as a fan of chaos theory, but a bigger fan of keeping your head on straight & not making too inviting a target for those who'd like to shoot you down.
> Not all non-linear systems conform to "chaos" theory but as far as I
> understand they could do so. Chaos theory anyway describes the situation
> with non-linear systems where a pattern of iterative interaction is
> relatively stable but not recurring absolutely mechanically.
Not exaxctly...
> Then under certain conditions it can flip into another pattern
> of a qualitatively different nature.
...but close enough to let slide for now.
> What has changed is not reality but our ability to model reality.
> Differential calculus is no longer the peak of scientific advance.
It's not about "peaks" or "advance", it's about the right tool for the job. And, as in most cases there is not necessarily one right answer.
It's more about more options.
> Computers give the tools to model non-linear iterative systems. More
> funding will head towards the development of more sophisticated models,
> which will sound decreasingly mechanical the more variables they include.
Chaos is unrelated to the number of variables.
> The overall picture has some features described by dialectical materialism,
> before fast computers had been invented. Or Daoism.
True but potentially mystifying. IMHO, you don't need to play the physics envy game. No one does.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"