- Josh Mayourian
- Roslyn, NY
- United States
Student , Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
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Will we ever truly be able to model nature?
My Bioelectricity professor Nina Tandon recently gave a TED talk “Caring for engineered tissue” and I was amazed how we are able to copy the environment of artificially grown cells. There are many techniques used to reduce error and create accurate results. Such amazing replications allow us to grow artificial hearts and bones, enhancing research opportunities on these
parts of the body. This made me wonder how successful we are at modeling
other living systems, so I watched the TED talk “Robert Full on engineering and evolution.” Many years ago, engineer's claimed bees shouldn't be able to fly, dolphins shouldn’t be able to swim, and geckos shouldn't be able to climb from their calculations. However, in the past few years we've been able to explain these phenomenons, showing how much we have progressed. Through watching these great talks, I was curious: How close are we to modeling nature and making predictions without ideal assumptions? Will we ever be able to reach this point and truly copy nature?
E Pines
The “theory of everything” or TOE remains a myth even as the ever-growing plethora of multidimensional “string” models in physics vie for this holy grail. Even where predicting aspects of perceived reality beyond those upon which it was predicated, a TOE certainly doesn’t account for itself. It is claimed that the “ultimately” refined “true” TOE will be shown to require itself. A physical object turned in a complete circle will come back into itself, a cleverly constructed circular logic would do the same for a TOE. It would be worse than meaningless, however, as now that circular logic created would need explanation by the TOE. Further, the notion that translating perception into theorem creates any new information at all, much less complete knowledge, is plain wrong. [Even in pure mathematics! – see Gregory Chaitin’s “Omega and why maths has no TOEs,” at: http://plus.maths.org/issue37/features/omega/]
No theory could deal with “Everything” unless it contained it, and only Infinity itself can do this. Absolute Infinity, however, has no definition, no boundaries, no rules, and so no exclusions. There can be no laws of chance, no laws of causality, but therefore, certainly no TOE.
Our goal then must be to perceive with greater accuracy and ever improve model. The true possibility to the next step in this is the joining of Humanity as a whole, a single mind like natural communities in Nature.. The Internet and true mutual responsibility may be all that we need.
david prosser
One thing I'd like to do is address the last overlying question Josh asks above: "Will we ever be able to reach this point and truly copy nature?"
And the question I have for this is, "What is the intention for wanting to do so?"
Because since civilizations beginnings man has built collective stories, throughout all the various cultures of the world, which distance mankind from Nature, pit us above her, or in some eternal struggle against her.
So, it seems that if we are to come to copy Nature then we will have to resolve this outlook. And that's where new education can come into the picture: To wipe away the old myths we have about Nature and each other.
And like E Pines says, "... the next step in this is the joining of Humanity as a whole, a single mind like natural communities in Nature." And that's another fundamental element that can't be separated from the search to copy Nature.
So I think that the first step in this process, of wanting to copy Nature, is proceeding according to how we see Nature operate: As an all inclusive system. And from my perspective, we are the only ones out of balance in this system.
So if we want to copy Nature (and yes please), then we must learn to adapt ourselves to Nature. And, given our collective history as a species, this doesn't come naturally to us. We need new education, devised with the goal of, "adapting us to Nature," to be created and then distributed to everyone (so not just education for children or young adults; but for everyone, since it takes a united humanity to come into balance, or to copy Nature).
Ami krieger
Caitlin Luview
The answer to this, in my view, depends entirely on one's intention.
The infiniteness of nature is something that science has yet to fully reveal. Every time the microscope reaches to further smallness, the complexity grows, and every time the macroscope reaches further, the seeming limits increase.
Perhaps science serves one better when it asks a different question: What is nature? That nature's forms have continually eluded our greatest technologies throughout all history, and its integrally intermingled and intertwined systems are so beautifully interdependent that mankind cannot predict its effects, begs a different question and a different application of science that better serves all of our global human family and our wondrous Universe.
Mary M. 100+
But, after reading the last few entries I will say a little something.
The first thing that came to mind about modeling nature is, well, nature is our tutor. Many of the wonderful designs in nature have made our life more "comfortable". In some cases even allowed us to do things we would never have imagined.....like soaring in the air while parasailing over the ocean......not that I would dare venture out.
Also another thought.....even if we were able to truly model nature, the model would be man made......it would require upkeep......it would break down eventually and we would have to give it maintanance, buy spare parts, oil it, or replace it with another new and improved version.
This leads me to man's shortsightedness. Today, as we are aware from the conversation on GM products, some are not happy with nature's design. They have engineered food........food!! Now can we really believe that a man made model of food, through engineering, will ever be as hearty and sustainable as the original? I don't know the answer.
I can only hope that we will arrive at it somehow....hopefully before things get out of hand.
And now one last thought, I posted this a while back on the TED talk about spiders.
Man-made model: Kevlar is a tough man-made fiber used in such items as bulletproof vests. To manufacture Kevlar, high temperatures and hazardous solvents are required.
Nature: Orb-weaving spiders produce seven types of silk. The sturdiest, known as dragline silk, is lighter than cotton yet, ounce for ounce, is stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar. If enlarged to the size of a football field, a web of dragline silk 0.4 inch thick with strands 1.6 inches apart could stop a jumbo jet in flight! Spiders produce dragline silk at room temperature, using water as a solvent.
Nature's design......JUST AWESOME!!!!!
John Vorwald
Flamebid Realtime
Buga Berkovic
Yep, I was trying to track down that quote, seems first one to say that was George E.P.Box. Smart guy! I mean, it all ends up to what do we want from model? By definition it should be simplification of the system? If we are making exact copy, why simply not use the real thing?
Philip Snape
I feel that in answering this question I am inclined to look to conclusions of a supernatural creator ("God") to account for the reasons that we have not yet replicated the process of forming diamond or gold.
Yet, I also feel that you were not asking for a answer of the metaphysical type, but the purely physical type which possibly requires a different way of approaching the subject.
Take diamond as an example though, we have not the resources or the expertise to create a perfectly flawed diamond - what we can do though is create a substitute with cubic zirconia. It will never will reach the point of truly copying diamond though, because each diamond in uniquely created and formed out of such scarce circumstances that we would be foolish to use our resources to imitate nature.
Coming back to my introduction though, I rarely feel that I (personally) am not part of nature, and so to copy human nature in technology perhaps is more achievable. I feel that if we achieve this then it would be a small step until other parts of the created universe become copied in technology.
First we need to understand human nature though....
"Aim to know the whole universe.... you will understand nothing,
Aim to know yourself... and you will understand the whole universe"
R H 20+
Antonio Tironi
Wayne Busby 30+
Maybe our math is quite simply insufficient? at least we can stay curious.
Comment deleted
Wayne Busby 30+
Einstein too stood on the shoulders of those who came before, turning over the older ideas from which grew his insights. This, consequently, made it possible for him to "invent" or "create" his theory. Building on the fore mentioned examples how far have we come today and what will we wrought tomorrow?...
soheila Jafari 500+
Theo Tetzlaff
http://www.livescience.com/528-scientists-finally-figure-bees-fly.html
Dolphins Swim
http://pda.physorg.com/_news68812337.html
And
http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/dn13553-dolphins-swim-so-fast-it-hurts.html
Geckos Climb
http://geckolab.lclark.edu/dept/geckostory.html
This took less than 4 minutes on my phone, including perusal time, typing and submitting. Rather than look for upper constraints on knowledge, lets put a little more effort into dispelling popular misconceptions that impede the impetus for discovery.
Josh Mayourian 50+
It's great to see that these problems have been solved, and shows the progress we have made. I watched a TED talk from many years back discussing these ideas, and it was a mistake not to check whether these problems have been solved yet. I will update the information above. From solving these problems in nature, biomimicry has had many great applications. Please do check out this link below!
http://brainz.org/15-coolest-cases-biomimicry/
However, there are so many different examples of problems in nature we are yet to solve. I would love to hear your input regarding this question presented.
Bill Gehling
An answer: Because we can't perform experiments on the real thing (eg for ethical reasons) or because we can't use it to predict the future.
It follows that: the model has to have more properties than the real thing, such as the ability to run it forward in time, or be subject to changed or postulated conditions. Therefore the model has to be in some way different to the real thing (not just a copy), as well as subject to the limitations of the human modeller and the modelling process. This is not to say that based on our (albeit inadequate) modelling abilities as humans, we couldn't invent or engineer something that is more useful and in some sense better than the real thing. Nor is it to deny the possibility that for physical and some biological processes we might build models that capture all their essential properties. But given that we are humans and the entire natural world is the product of 6 bn years of evoluton (or a God or a combination of both) then its hardly likely that one generation of us will be ablle to build a complete model of nature. We can already copy it and sex is more fun anyway.
Brendan Jorse
Not to detract from the insightful and interesting comments so far but I do have to ask, has anyone else looked into this claim? I feel that this discussion is great and I've enjoyed reading every one's opinions but I do feel that we are doing the pursuit of science and ourselves a disservice in accepting that quotation at face value.
We actually have an increasingly good understanding of how bees fly, geckos stick, and dolphins swim. There have been many interesting and exciting advances in these areas which sadly are not always widely publicised. Myths like these are perpetuated in the popular consciousness in part because people never hear about advances and assume none have been made.
But advances have been made and continue to be made. For instance, the realization that air viscosity is different on the insect scale in combination with high speed photography at Caltech has us well on our way to modeling the bee. Want to know how geckos stick, check out the work at Lewis & Clark College's gecko lab it's neat stuff. As for dolphins according to the math being unable to swim, that notion was proposed in the 1930's and we've come a long way in our understanding since then.
There is nothing wrong with saying we don't know how something works yet, that is exciting, that means there is something more to discover, that is the heart of science, but myths like these are harmful.
Countless people have worked really hard to get us to our current level of understanding. So please lets continue the discussion but perhaps we can take a moment to give credit where credit is due.
Rob Middleton
I would also add that discoveries in the field of mathematics with regards Chaos theory and the more popularly known 'Butterfly effect' mean that we can now prove, mathematically, that it is nigh on impossible to predict complex systems present in nature, unpredictability is wired into their very fabric. What I find amazing about this is that, instead of predicting nature in the way that so many hoped we could given enough information and computing power, we can now prove mathematically exactly why we will never be able to predict complex systems present in nature with any degree of certainty and even more remarkably still we have been able to go one further and use this to explain the extraordinary variety present in nature, as the 'Mandelbrot set' visualisations eloquently describe.
To conclude I think that human understanding has advanced so rapidly in these fields that the questions raised by Josh are no longer relevant.
In short, to answer Josh's question - 'No' and it's likely that we never will with any degree of accuracy ...and here's the maths that explains why!
Alison Gallensky
Anthony Parisi
However,we DO know (or at least, have a very strong idea) of how bees fly, dolphins swim, and geckos climb. Some quick links that I found with a brief Google search:
Bees flying:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1076/is-it-aerodynamically-impossible-for-bumblebees-to-fly
Dolphins swimming:
http://jeb.biologists.org/content/200/1/65.full.pdf
Geckos climbing:
http://geckolab.lclark.edu/dept/geckostory.html
There are some mysteries out there, but these are often touted as areas that “science has failed to solve,” which first, isn't indicative of the process of science and second, isn't factually true. In cases where science has not yet penetrated a phenomenon and discovered an adequate rule or set of rules to describe how the phenomenon occurs, that doesn't actually indicate a problem with our ability to model but rather indicates that we have not yet modelled the phenomenon accurately. If we believe ourselves to have a complete model and something is still unexplained, that may indicate a flaw with our model, it may indicate we are asking the wrong sort of question, or it may indicate that we are mistaken about a general principle of the phenomenon in question. In any of these cases, it doesn't indicate that we cannot, in principle, model the phenomenon.
Buga Berkovic
I'd answer your questions with another one: Why do we have to be able to model nature perfectly? I don't see why it's necessary, but also I do not think it's possible. Simply because we are not able to account for all the evolution, and the complexity of each involved process and individual. Without fully understanding all of it, we still do build models, don't we? And they work occasionally. To our use, they work well. I can't resist mentioning a quote a professor of mine used recently, quoting another colleague of his, where he said "all models are wrong, just some of them are useful".
I think this happens either because we simplified object of study to the level where what we know is actually enough. And what we are looking for is really well studied and is a simple system (as simple as a nature can be...). Or, which I find more likely, in our ignorance, we did get results resembling the real thing, but they still don't mean we know what causes what. We know what co-occurs with what. Which might be enough often. (To make it more clear, I'm talking from ecological modelling, where what we're trying to convert into a model is a natural world, in all it's complexity and secrecy.) In any case, I think another important question is: what do we do with models that we already have and which seem to work well? Do we use them to learn more, or to get profit, or to provide benefit for the life itself, the planet with everything on and around it?
To look at it with a smile on your face, here Michael Pawlyn showed we do know a lot. And we know how to use that knowledge. Where's the problem then?
http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pawlyn_using_nature_s_genius_in_architecture.html
This should be much more relevant - to use what we know to fix what we did, to minimize damage we're causing and to learn how to sustainably function on this planet. And we do know enough for that. Even with imperfect models.
Nicolette Sinensky 50+
I think your quote "all models are wrong, just some of them are useful" really gets to the point. Whenever I learn about a model of a physical system, I always have a nagging feeling that it can't possibly work considering all the simplifying assumptions we make. But despite that, many of them do a great job of representing the system. It just depends on the purpose of the model.
If we can model something well enough that it meets our purposes, can we call that "truly modeling"? For that situation, the model perfectly represents what we want it to. Of course the model is wrong, but that doesn't mean it we can't use it to copy nature.
Hemin Faraidun
Joanna Cruz
I also think it is a daunting task to exactly copy natural phenomena, part for part, section for section, concept for concept. To emulate nature completely is something that is so difficult because the level of intricacies and connections is so high as you have stated but does our modeling and emulations have to be a mere reduction of nature? I think it is possible to gather information about nature and collate them in a way to exceed nature or at least develop a method or procedure that is more efficient. I think our motivations for improvement stem from nature. We see a functional method but there are possible deficiencies in it. Modeling nature may not be possible but improving it might be.
Martin Ciupa
Vincent Poirier
There's a joke by standup comic Steven Wright: I have a map of the United States. It's actual size. It says "one mile equals one mile".
A model is a simplification of nature. It must be complex enough to be meaningful but simple enough to be useful. The actual size map, is a model that perfectly matches the United States but it's of course useless.
A model can be refuted and still prove very useful. We have decisively rejected the earth centered solar system, but in every day life, we use still use it: we say the sun rises and the sun sets. We have refuted Newtonian mechanics but we still use his model when designing cars, calculating ballistic trajectories, etc. It wouldn't be practical to use Einstein's model, unless of course we are dealing with extreme values, where Newton's model breaks down.
Yaakov Davis
Unless the model is an exact replica of nature, with ALL of its components, you can't be sure that the model is an accurate description which gives accurate predictions. There's always a chance that some missing part in your model holds for a certain nature phenomena, which you won't see in the model. Similarly, due to missing parts, the model can give false predictions, which aren't part of nature.
So, in summary, you can make as many models as you wish, but you're never going to be sure you modeled nature correctly.
Tomasz Skazinski
There is an open source project I started with is related to this subject and how modelling of our social landscape and letting solutions evolve much like living systems evolve to match ecosystems, this in turn would steer our species towards social optimization to whatever we deem as our direction - solutions would emerge just like living organisms create novel and creative ways to reproduce and continue the gene flow. Its called 'Zemerge' - http://zemerge.com/wiki/
Charalambos Paraskeva
On the first account of modelling, it will depend on the capacity of technology to produce ever more complex equipment to perform the calculations necessary to model natural systems (social systems are considered subsystems), as well as developments in mathematics and statistics. In this direction we are still quite far away from truly modelling nature due to the number of factors that we need to take into consideration.
On the second account of copying I would say we are already very close. Technology, physics, chemistry and mechanics are already cooperating on many facets of replication of nature ranging from abstract general laws to real world events and objects. For the moment we are essentially able to copy nature by using alternative materials. It is within reason that at some point we will be able to exactly copy nature, as we are indeed striving to decode the underlying mechanisms linking its various components.
soheila Jafari 500+
Is it time to leave the nature alone and let it do its job? not to destroy it, no to copy it and not to model it.
Anthony Parisi
There are a lot of things in the world that could be better, and we want them to be better. In the end, that requires accurate information, which can be expressed in terms of models, as well as the general rules used to build those models.
So I guess my answer is that we model nature because we hope to use the rules we find to improve our lives and the lives of others around us: cure disease, improve the quality of food, build structures, the list goes on.
Josh Mayourian 50+
This theme of effects of modeling nature seems like a great topic, and I'd love to hear more people's views on this!
Philip Snape
So, if we are to grow our ability of freewill (choice), some would say that we must first have knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, correct and incorrect etc.
Surely though, growing our willpower to choose good, right, correct choices that will be best for the planet and the human species as a whole, does not require us to experiment with every other option until our resources are exhausted.
Hmmmm.... perhaps this all sounds more like gospel than ideas, but will there ever be a time in history where humankind will become perfect? And what would humankind do with the key of life if it became ours? If we were able to replicate and manipulate any aspect of nature, would we use it for good or evil? Creation or destruction?
Glenn Barres
Erik Richardson 500+
1.) Nature itself will be changed in the process of our approach because the capacity for segregation is a myth. Look at the examples of ecosystems changed by rampant gmo cross-pollination with wild plants or the environmental impact created by collapsed technology from oil rigs to nuclear plants. The fact will remain that our simulations always require interface with the natural system at too many points - both through input and via the output.
2.) The second is that we ourselves - a large-impact segment of nature - will also be changed by the attempts and the approximations. Here we can consider, among other things, the change in learning/education styles that are evolving as well as the effect of internet technology of socio-cultural systems.
We could multiply and analyze many more examples and data points, but the heart of the idea holds still and that is to say: No, because nature and what it means to model it will both change in non-discrete ways as we proceed. An asymptotic approach may still remain valuable, mind you, but we will never reach the actual result.
Paul Lillebo
Andrew Kiang 50+
Yu-An Chen 50+
It is a great article about modeling, I agree with your and Paul's point. Intuitively, I think perfect modeling of nature is impossible given how many parameters should be considered and the degree of their effectiveness. According to chaos theory, a system behavior is hardly predictable, as the random elements are getting involved included into the system. I agree that it is getting close is sufficient for most of the cases.
Debra Smith 200+
Andrew Tam
Looking back from our vantage point, we might be able to reason why some developments happened; we can logic and think our way through them. However, what nature did was different; evolution seemed more or less like a "go with the flow" kind of process. There was no real thought process or brain power behind it, it just happened, maybe instinctively. I think this difference alone is enough to set us apart from nature - nature always seems to be one step ahead of us without thinking, while we think and struggle only to make less than perfect imitations of what nature has already provided.