Hawking & Deming: Boiling the Human Caldron

[FVoehl@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/30/02 7:20:53 AM, rrramirez@cantv.net writes:

<< Each  time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the 
theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a  new 
observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the  theory.

How this concept could be related to Dr Deming's  Theory? >>

Reinaldo asks an excellent question that deserves some serious attention.  
Dr. Deming would say that the world often makes a messy laboratory for 
scientists and mathematicians with its cauldron of five million interacting 
species.  What he meant was that mathematically-inclined scientists of the 
twentieth century built their disciplines around systrems that stripped out 
the noise and color of real life and treated populations as dynamical 
systems.  Ecologists, om the other hand, use the elementary tools of 
mathematical physics to describe life's ebb and flows.  

In the emergence of chaos theory in the late 70s and in the 1980s, ecologists 
were to play a special role.  They used mathematical models, but they always 
knew and belived that the models were, at best, thin approximations of the 
seething real world--this boiling cauldron of five million species, 
interacting and bring about constant change.  Dr. Deming used his awareness 
of these limitations to see the importance of some ideas that mathematicians 
and physicists like Hawking had considered oddities.  If regular equations 
could produce irregular behavior. . .to Deming, this rang a few bells.  Their 
equations applied to population biology were elementary counterparts of the 
models used by physicists for their pieces of the universe.

The bottom line is that the complexity of the real phenomena studied in the 
life sciences far outstripped any models found in the physicist's labatory.  
Biologist's mathematical models, which Dr. Deming found to be very 
instructive,  are more of a caricature of reality--similar to those of the 
economists, demographers, urban planners, and they with the soft sciences, 
attempting to study systems changing over time.  The standards are so very 
different.  

For example, the physicist would find a system of equations like those of 
Edward Lorenz (the Butterfy Effect) produced to be so simple as to be almost 
transparent.  On the other hand, a biologist would find Lorenz's equations to 
be forbiddingly complex, being three-dimensional, always variable, and 
analytically intractable.  In the back of the ecologist's mind was the 
assumption that an erratic string of numbers probally meant that the 
calculator was acting up, or simply lacked acuuracy.  The stable solutions 
were the interesting ones, for the point of oversimplifying was to try and 
model regularity. 

For some, order has become its own reward .


Frank Voehl (FVoehl@aol.com)
CEO, Strategy Associates, Inc.
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