Executive Summary

Per Bak made two important discoveries:

1. Many natural phenomena with large differences in power (like Earthquakes) have the same cause, with the differences being caused by what state the underlying system is in. This is summarised by the idiom of “the straw that broke the camel’s back” – the same straw could do absolutely nothing (if there was no straw on the camel) or cause the camel serious injury (if it is already carrying all the weight it could possibly handle).
2. Many complex phenomena are emergent properties of underlying simpler phenomena, and it is often very hard to predict in advance what complexities can arise.

The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back

Per Bak was a theoretical physicist whose 1996 book “How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality” made a huge impression on me.

Per co-authored a seminal 1987 paper with Chao Tang and Kur Wiesenfeld about a fairly simple experiment in which a pile of sand was built up one grain at a time from a central point; a similar experiment can be seen on Sergei Klishin’s YouTube channel. They found that most of the time the addition of a grain has very little effect, but it eventually causes the growing pile to become unstable, resulting in a collapse – an avalanche – that causes the base to widen and the overall pile to become more stable.

As you may expect, there are a lot more small avalanches than large ones, however there are a couple of intriguing results – whilst the probability of an avalanche increases as more and more grains are dropped, there is no way to tell whether the next grain of sand will cause an avalanche, or how big the avalanche will be if it does occur. Also, there is a mathematical relationship between the size of the avalanches and how many there are – which as it turns out is the same relationship that exists between the size of avalanches in the real world and how many there are, similarly with earthquakes and volcanoes and many other natural occurrences.

Emergence – Complexity arises from Simplicity

As such this led to the theory that not only are many natural events virtually impossible to predict no matter how much data you have, but also that what appear to be very complex and random events with widely different impacts (like earthquakes) are actually potentially all caused by the same underlying simple process.

In his book Per extended this idea and suggested that many other seemingly complex systems may also have a simple process at their heart, including financial markets, traffic jams, biological evolution, the distribution of galaxies in the Universe, and even the brain.

Whilst these ideas alone are enough to inspire a generation of Scientists, what many people who have discussed this book seem to have missed is that the central idea has two separate parts. The second part is that it appears that Nature is, at its heart, fundamentally simple. This is the opposite of what many Scientists have been preaching over the last century – when I was making my way through school I was taught with each year that the Universe was a lot more complicated than what I’d been taught in the previous year. We went from being taught that everything we see is made up of a few fundamental particles to an entire particle zoo, and the main conclusion of Quantum Mechanics is that we cannot possibly understand the Universe at all, especially at the lowest level – we cannot even tell where something is, just come up with increasingly complicated mathematical models to predict where things might be. In fact, its prime advocate, Richard Feynman, was quoted as saying “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics”, which is not what you want to be told by someone who is meant to be teaching you the subject.

So what happens if the last century of Physics has been leading us up a blind alley, in the opposite direction of where we should be going? The theory that the Universe is fundamentally simple is not even a new idea. Nearly 2500 years ago a number of Greek and Hindu Philosophers (the Scientists of their time) theorised that if you continue to divide up matter you would eventually come to a point where you could go no further; you would have a fundamental particle – in Greek this was called the atomos (which means indivisible), which is where we get the word “atom” from. They also suggested that there was a second reality that made up the physical world – the void (empty space, through which atoms were able to move and collide with each other). At around the same time Chinese Philosophers had come up with a not completely dissimilar idea, in that the Universe was made out of two opposites that are actually connected, which is represented by the Yin Yang symbol:

This concept of two opposing forces – dualism – also features heavily in the culture of many other ancient societies.

It is with these ideas in mind that I have spent the last few decades searching for theories that are at their heart simple, and yet explain the Universe as well as, or preferably better, than the increasingly complex theories I was taught through to University and often beyond. On this site I describe a number of candidates that I believe fit the bill, especially the bombarding and spinning photon model of Miles Mathis and the Electric Universe Theory.