Ethics in the Conflicts of Modularity

A simple pendulum modeled as a harmonic oscillator with error bars illustrates how the uncertainty principle can be connected to gravity and if you use this as a modular puzzle piece in an algorithm, you could model most anything quite easily, but if physics is reduced to such a simple theory of everything, the physics compartmentalization system will break down and many richly encoded languages will disappear due to lack of maintenance. Without adept translators, knowledge could be buried within the mountains of almost indecipherable academic papers that have accumulated over the past century.

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The problem with non-compartmentalized physics is that when the code which describes a physical system becomes more modular, anyone can create a model to make predictions through copy and paste algorithm construction. In the language of programming: non-compartmentalized physics has a large amount of code-reuse because when functions and variables are no longer overloaded, complex translation is no longer required before code can be repurposed.

It seems to me that many of the world’s secrets are hidden in plain sight. Most people are just too busy or distracted to do the necessary translation work. I wonder if Julia has met Winston yet.

This compartmentalized system becomes unwieldy because if you want to add a method to it, you have to convince the system architect to add it and maintain it. When each method can’t be repurposed, you have to maintain too many methods. You have to train people to maintain those methods and if you don’t train them, the methods are lost.

For example, the methods used to simulate fluid dynamics are among the most computationally intensive because it is difficult to make good approximations of the Euler-Lagrange equations. That is how you would state this problem in physics language, but in math language, you would say, “There is no solution to the Navier-Stokes equation.” If people recognize that a modular solution to both of these problems can be repurposed from harmonic oscillators, certain types of technology adaptation might accelerate in an uncontrolled, unexpected fashion.

Lost methods are a natural development in a system that self-encrypts, hiding meaning within layers of definitions and re-definitions. The rate of self-encryption grows in proportion to the investment in the field and, in the post-war era, the field of physics has been the recipient of unprecedented levels of investment. Just as the global economy inflated, so did the scale of physics research and its large projects of dubious merit.

Just as a global economy cannot inflate forever because energy resources are finite, a physics ecosystem cannot encrypt itself indefinitely. The tower of Babel will eventually fall and the language will become indecipherable.

Power protects power and each language protects itself, but in an environment of shrinking funding, languages may attack one another and go extinct. If you know this is happening or about to happen, the responsible thing to do is to translate the most valuable concepts into a common language.

Yet how can you get anyone to agree on such a language?

Perhaps the answer is given to us by nature itself. When a slime mold begins to starve, it forms itself into a stalk which creates spores that might blow away and seed a new colony while all of the cells in the stalk stay behind and die, but when the stalk forms, a few stragglers always stay behind around the surface. In some sense, these stragglers are not as fit as the herd. They seem to be defective since they refuse to think and move with the group, but closer inspection shows that they play a key role as a hedge in ensuring the survival of the colony.

When cells start to starve, they send chemical signals to their neighbors; when enough cells sound the alarm, the aggregation process begins. Tarnita and her colleagues built a simple model to show that the observed loner patterns could be explained by individual cells transforming into their actively aggregating form at different rates. As more cells aggregated, their starvation signals degraded. At a certain point, “there will be a few cells left behind that just don’t hear anyone screaming ‘danger’ anymore, because everyone who had been screaming ‘danger’ has already left,” Tarnita said. Those remaining cells are the loners.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/out-of-sync-loners-may-secretly-protect-orderly-swarms-20200521/

The loners who stayed behind might get lucky if conditions improve while those trapped in the stalk can’t turn around and go back to where they came from.

Groups exhibit swarming behaviour and power protects power. These are things that can be simulated with a modular code and a common language, but perhaps the predictions of such codes would be disruptive if everyone had access to them.

Corruption surrounding nodes of power in a network adds another layer of complexity to these systems as Ronan Farrow discovered when he investigated Harvey Weinstein and some of his old allies, like Hillary Clinton, suddenly gave him a cold shoulder.

Perhaps solutions to corruption can be found in some Hollywood storylines. In the Police Academy movies, a plucky band of misfits who ordinarily wouldn’t have been accepted by the academy teamed up to stop corruption by using ingenuity that wouldn’t have been approved by those who were typically selected by the academy.

These are some ideas I’m exploring in the novel I’m working on. It is set in a world in which language is a dying art. There is a worm that is encrypting everything on the internet by replacing key words.

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The image in the header is from Splashdown at Star City: the amazing underwater space facility