PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

2. NEEDLES IN A HAYSTACK
This pattern of learning is not restricted to individuals. It is also encountered
with a well-defined group of people, a country or humanity as
a whole. For example, the scientific community has followed this same
pattern, as if it were a single individual, while discovering the stable
chemical elements throughout the centuries. If we make a graph of the
number of elements known at any given time, an accumulation of
knowledge, we obtain a pattern that resembles the S-curve of an infant’s
learning process. The main difference is that the time scale is in centuries
instead of years. What may have been thought of as random
discoveries are seen to be associated with a regular curve.
The first dozen elements had been known for a very long time; iron,
copper, gold, mercury, and carbon were familiar to the men of antiquity.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, there was a thirst and
a push for discovering more and more stable elements, and by the mid
twentieth century, all the naturally available elements had been found.
Still, researchers pushed for more discoveries, now carried out in particle
accelerators. These late entries—one may say concoctions—hardly
deserve the name “stable” elements because they last only a short time
before they decay. At any rate, we have been running out of those, too.
The last artificially created element was established in 1984. Overall,
the 250-year-long discovery process seems to have followed the path of
natural growth and reached completion.
In both learning processes discussed above, we see “random” discoveries
following overall orderly curves, an apparent contradiction
since randomness is associated with chaotic behavior while S-curves
represent the order imposed by the logistic law. It can be shown, however,
that chaos is seeded with S-curves to begin with, and James Gleick
in his book Chaos explains how chaos can result from a prolonged action
of the logistic law. One can find an “eerie sense of order” in chaotic
patterns. We will be looking more closely at the relationship between
order and chaos in Chapter Ten, and will conclude that such a type of
order should not be so eerie after all.
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