Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

philosophical aspects, Prigogine and Gell-Mann note 76 . Thus the limitations of theNewtonian paradigm have been deliberately addressed as a new paradigm developed that wasable to explain phenomena that could be not addressed within the classic paradigm. And thisdoes not mean that theorists are suggesting that the traditional underlying assumptions arewrong. Boyd’s understanding about the nature of science and is almost literally reflected inobservations by Capra (shared by others), who note that instead,modern science has come to realize that all scientific theories are approximations to the truenature of reality; and that each theory is valid for a certain range of phenomenon. Beyondthis range it no longer gives a satisfactory description of nature, and new theories have to befound to replace the old one, or, rather, to extend it by improving the approximations 77 .The end of certaintyThe new paradigm developed from changes of concepts and ideas that occurred in physicsduring the first three decades of the 20 th century. And these changes feature prominently inBoyd’s work: relativity theory, quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. The firstblow to the Laplacian school dominating science was delivered by thermodynamics. TheSecond Law of Thermodynamics, which Boyd alludes to in Destruction and Creation and ANew Conception for Air-to-Air Combat, deals with dissipation of energy 78 . This law also featuresprominently in Chaos and Complexity theory. While the total energy involved in a process isalways constant, the amount of useful energy is diminishing, dissipating into heat, friction,and so on. The broader philosophical significance was that it introduced into physics the ideaof irreversible processes, of an “arrow of time”.According to the Second Law, there is a certain trend in physical phenomena.Mechanical energy is dissipated into heat and cannot be completely recovered, as when hotand cold water are brought together. What such processes have in common is that theyproceed in a certain direction - from order to disorder. Any isolated physical system willproceed spontaneously in the direction of ever increasing disorder. This unidirectionalprocess was described in a new quantity called “entropy”. Entropy is a quantity thatmeasures a degree of evolution of a physical system.Entropy in an isolated physical system will keep increasing and because thisevolution is accompanied by increasing disorder, entropy can also be seen as a measure ofdisorder. This process will continue until an equilibrium has been reached called “heatdeath”. Then all activity has ceased, all material evenly distributed and at the sametemperature. According to classical physics the universe as a whole evolves toward such astate of maximum entropy; it is running down and will eventually grind to a halt 79 , which wasthe message of Rifkin’s book Boyd read and a prospect Boyd included as a warning formembers of closed strategic entities.Darwinism also forced scientists to abandon the Cartesian conception of the worldas a machine. Instead the universe had to be pictured as an evolving and ever changing76 Prigogine and Stengers (1984), p. 309; Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in theSimple and the Complex, (Freeman & Company, New York, 1994), p.136.77 Capra (1982), p.101.78 At Georgia Tech Boyd had studied James B. Jones and George A. Hawkins; EngineeringThermodynamics (1960), but later works, such as Rifkin’s, take the concept far beyond the realm ofengineering.79 Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (Bantam Books, New York, 1982), pp.72-74. See for a more detailedaccount in particular Coveney and Highfield (1990).96