Related papers: Duality, Fundamentality, and Emergence
There has been much controversy over weak and strong emergence in physics and biology. As pointed out by Phil Anderson in many papers, the existence of broken symmetries is the key to emergence of properties in much of solid state physics.…
The emergent nature of quantum mechanics is shown to follow from a precise correspondence with the classical theory of irreversible thermodynamics.
"Emergence", the phenomenon where a complex system displays properties, behaviours, or dynamics not trivially reducible to its constituent elements, is one of the defining properties of complex systems. Recently, there has been a concerted…
Relationships between current theories, and relationships between current theories and the sought theory of quantum gravity (QG), play an essential role in motivating the need for QG, aiding the search for QG, and defining what would count…
This is an essay in what might be called ``mathematical metaphysics.'' There is a fundamental duality that run through mathematics and the natural sciences. The duality starts as the logical level; it is represented by the Boolean logic of…
Although the suspicion that quantum mechanics is emergent has been lingering for a long time, only now we begin to understand how a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics might be squared with Bell's inequalities and other…
I conceptualise the role of dualities in quantum gravity, in terms of their functions for theory construction. I distinguish between two functions of duality in physical practice: namely, discovering and describing 'equivalent physics', vs.…
In this short note we study the semantics of two basic computational effects, exceptions and states, from a new point of view. In the handling of exceptions we dissociate the control from the elementary operation which recovers from the…
Two different conceptions of emergence are reconciled as two instances of the phenomenon of detection. In the process of comparing these two conceptions, we find that the notions of complexity and detection allow us to form a unified…
According to quantum theory, randomness is a fundamental property of the universe yet classical physics is mostly deterministic. In this article I show that it is possible for deterministic systems to arise from random ones and discuss the…
In previous work, I described several examples combining reduction and emergence: where reduction is understood a la Ernest Nagel, and emergence is understood as behaviour or properties that are novel (by some salient standard). Here, my…
Quantum mechanics is 'emergent' if a statistical treatment of large scale phenomena in a locally deterministic theory requires the use of quantum operators. These quantum operators may allow for symmetry transformations that are not present…
These are intended to be review notes on emergent symmetries, i.e., symmetries which manifest themselves in specific sectors of energy in many systems. The emphasis is on the physical aspects rather than computation methods. We include some…
A new, extended nonlinear framework of the ordinary real analysis incorporating a novel concept of {\em duality structure} and its applications into various nonlinear dynamical problems is presented. The duality structure is an asymptotic…
This is one of two papers about emergence, reduction and supervenience. It expounds these notions and analyses the general relations between them. The companion paper analyses the situation in physics, especially limiting relations between…
This thesis discusses various aspects of duality in quantum field theory and string theory. In the first part we consider duality in topological quantum field theories, concentrating on the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten theories as (dual)…
A new kind of duality between the deep structures of spacetime and matter is proposed here, considering two partial orders which incorporate causality, extensity, and discreteness. This may have surprising consequences for the emergence of…
Emergence is a pregnant property in various fields. It is the fact for a phenomenon to appear surprisingly and to be such that it seems at first sight that it is not possible to predict its apparition. That is the reason why it has often…
In another paper (Butterfield 2011), one of us argued that emergence and reduction are compatible, and presented four examples illustrating both. The main purpose of this paper is to develop this position for the example of phase…
In this paper I bring the recent philosophical literature on theoretical equivalence to bear on dualities in physics. Focusing on electromagnetic duality, which is a simple example of S-duality in string theory, I will show that the duality…