More is Different

Last week, I read a nearly 50 year old essay by P. W. Anderson (h/t fermatslibrary) entitled "More is Different" (pdf). It is a fascinating opinion piece.

• "Quantitative differences become qualitative ones" - Marx
• Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry.

This other essay on the "arrogance of physicists" speaks to a similar point:

But training and experience in physics gives you a very powerful toolbox of techniques, intuitions and approaches to solving problems that molds your outlook and attitude toward the rest of the world. Other fields of science or engineering are limited in their scope. Mathematics is powerful and immense in logical scope, but in the end it is all tautology, as I tease my mathematician friends, with no implied or even desired connection to the real world. Physics is the application of mathematics to reality and the 20th century proved its remarkable effectiveness in understanding that world, from the behavior of the tiniest particles to the limits of the entire cosmos. Chemistry generally confines itself to the world of atoms and molecules, biology to life, wonderful in itself, but confined so far as we know to just this planet. The social sciences limit themselves still further, mainly to the behavior of us human beings - certainly a complex and highly interesting subject, but difficult to generalize from. Engineering also has a powerful collection of intuitions and formulas to apply to the real world, but those tend to be more specific individual rules, rather than the general and universal laws that physicists have found. 

Computer scientists and their practical real-world programming cousins are perhaps closest to physicists in justified confidence in the generality of their toolbox. Everything real can be viewed as computational, and there are some very general rules about information and logic that seep into the intuition of any good programmer. As physics is the application of mathematics to the real world of physical things, so programming is the application of mathematics to the world of information about things, and sometimes those two worlds even seem to be merging.