Dr Adlam,

As a fellow contestant, congratulations on your win! I regret not having read your essay earlier, owing to the large number of entries this year.

Your essay is highly readable, with a truly delightful starting anecdote. It is exceedingly well researched, and rich in history and references relevant to the word "fundamental." I like also that you directly addressed the core...

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Dr Adlam,

As a fellow contestant, congratulations on your win! I regret not having read your essay earlier, owing to the large number of entries this year.

Your essay is highly readable, with a truly delightful starting anecdote. It is exceedingly well researched, and rich in history and references relevant to the word "fundamental." I like also that you directly addressed the core question of the essay contest this year, which was how to define the word versus providing a fundamental theory of physics.

Regarding your conclusion, however, I suspect that your essay is in need of a new word.

The word fundamental is after all reductionist not only in a negative sense, but also in a highly positive sense. Yes, many emergent phenomena are simpler and more unified than processes that lead to them. But to deny the importance of understanding the smaller parts that lead to complex systems would be to deny the very goals of science. It is powerful to document the behavior of an atom, but it is even more powerful to know how its inner parts work together to create atoms of all types.

For lack of a better word, I will invent one: existamental. An atom is more existamental than a proton because it is displays highly specific, hard-to-predict emergent behaviors that in turn make it a vital part of a truly interesting universe, a universe whose parts are capable of observing and assessing itself to ponder just such issues. A close examination of the proton does not easily lead to recognizing such possibilities. That such properties exist anyway is what makes them existamental. The astonishing chain chemistry of carbon is more existamental than the simpler salts of inorganic chemistry, for out of those chains emerge large-scale systems of astonishing complexity, complexity that could not easily have been predicted in advance by looking at carbon atoms only in isolation.

Thus as I read your essay I see two complementary threads. The first and better known thread is about fundamentality in the form of positive, purposeful reductionism. This positive thread seeks out smaller and structurally simpler parts to enable a better understanding of how more complex entities work. The second thread is existamentality, which moves in the opposite direction. The search for more existamental phenomena is the search for the chains and hierarchies of emphatically unobvious emergent phenomena that collectively make possible a universe that is both deeply interesting and capable of observing itself. But existamentality is not just about material complexity. I suspect that space and time will eventually be found to be among the most deeply existamental phenomena of all, since without them both fundamental and existamental phenomena would cease to exist.

Your essay thus should not be misread as an argument for simply discarding fundamentality and the scientific search for simpler structures. It is instead a lucid argument for seeking a better understanding of existamentality, which is after all the search for how and why emergent effects unexpectedly join together to produce atoms, families, and playing cards that are perversely designed to trip up physicists.

Sincerely,

Terry Bollinger

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As is usual with physicists, first prize winner Emily Adlam seems to have a rather misguided and superficial view of “what sorts of things need explaining” [1].

1. Re “. . . We physicists are fond of mathematics. . .”:

The universe sustains fundamental-level relationships so regular that we can represent them as mathematical equations: you can bet your life on them (e.g. if...

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As is usual with physicists, first prize winner Emily Adlam seems to have a rather misguided and superficial view of “what sorts of things need explaining” [1].

1. Re “. . . We physicists are fond of mathematics. . .”:

The universe sustains fundamental-level relationships so regular that we can represent them as mathematical equations: you can bet your life on them (e.g. if you were travelling in a spaceship to another planet). But how does the universe “know” about these very particular regularities (and not some other regularity)?

In fact, physics entails a hidden assumption that there exists an aspect of reality whereby the universe somehow “knows” about the very specific fundamental-level relationships that it sustains. I.e. A “knowledge” aspect of reality is fundamental.

Seemingly this knowledge exists at a particle level. And clearly, all higher-level knowledge possessed by the living things that are built out of these particles, is built out of this fundamental-level knowledge.

2. Numbers:

Physicists like to gloss over the aspect of fundamental-level reality that they represent with numbers e.g. the numbers that represent a specific, measured, momentum or energy.

Adlan’s euphemisms, which fail to mention numbers, are (e.g.): “without explaining their specific form”, “some features will be left underdetermined by the global constraints”, “as long as the arbitrary features are of the harmless kind”, and “there’s usually no need to decide how things are on a microscopic level”.

But rather than “moving away from the reductionist picture” and ending up with weird, supernatural and bizarre views about the universe (e.g. “the universe is efficient, and doesn’t bother answering questions when it doesn’t need to”), surely it would be better to think a bit harder about what could be, and what could cause, the fundamental-level reality that we represent with numbers.

Clearly, there is a “causal” aspect to the universe that “decide[s] how things are on a microscopic level”, that “decides” on (what we represent as) numbers. The only candidate is the particles (that “know” about fundamental-level relationships): they have a “causal” aspect, an ability to cause new relationships, just like the living things that are built out of these particles have an ability to cause new relationships.

……………………………

1. Fundamental? by Emily Christine Adlam, https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3006

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