PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7. COMPETITION IS THE CREATOR AND THE REGULATOR
It is not difficult to come up with an explanation for this clustering.
The first twelve elements have been known from antiquity: gold, silver,
iron, copper, carbon, and so forth. Their discovery may have followed
an initial growth process stretching out over many centuries. Discovering
the remaining elements began with industrialization in the middle of
the eighteenth century and progressed in well-defined cycles. Each cycle
is associated with the technology available for separating these elements.
The cycle of using chemical properties was succeeded by the
cycle of using physical properties. This was succeeded by the cycle of
using nuclear properties, whereupon elements started being created artificially
in particle accelerators, which produced elements that decay
soon after creation and hardly deserve the name stable. Recent claims
for discoveries involve elements with half-lives down to the milliseconds,
sometimes produced in quantities of fewer than 100 atoms. What
constitutes a new element in such circumstances has become an increasingly
important question. The succession of cycles in element discovery
must be considered at an end.
A question remains, however. Why are the cycles almost regularly
spaced? Is there any significance to the fact that this spacing is similar to
the one that characterized the appearance of basic innovations? We will
attempt to answer this question in the next chapter. For the time being,
Figure 7.3 provides evidence that an overall S-growth may reveal, upon
closer examination, a succession of similar but shorter contours reflecting a
wavy structure rather than a uniform continuous stream.
S-curve succession was first mentioned in Chapter Two with the example
of an infant’s vocabulary, which reaches the first plateau at the
age of six when it exhausts the vocabulary of the home “niche.” Acquisition
of vocabulary (like the discovery of stable elements) proceeds in
waves, one before six, and one or more afterward depending on the linguistic
variety of the subsequent environments. The home niche is
followed by the school niche, which may be followed by yet another
niche later on.
But one may need to combine S-curves in a different way than by
simply cascading them. There are situations where a new niche may
appear within an older niche, usually after some technological change
such as, such as making watches waterproof that allowed swimmers to
wear them. The situation of a niche-within-a-niche is exemplified by
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