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

any new system we must construct or uncover another system beyond it. Over and over thiscycle must be repeated to determine the consistency of more and more elaborate systems 91 .Boyd not only referred to original works of these authors. Additionally, severalauthors whose books Boyd had read describe these fundamental changes and point at thesimilarities of the philosophical and epistemological implications 92 . Capra wrote in 1975 that‘the classical mechanistic world view had to be abandoned at the beginning of this [20 th ]century when quantum theory and relativity theory forced us to adopt a much more subtle,holistic, and “organic” view of nature’ 93 . As Paul Davies noted in a popular book included inBoyd’s list of personal papers, in the 1920s a revolution occurred in fundamental physics thatshook the scientific community and focused attention as never before on the relationbetween observer and the external world. It forms a pillar in what has become known as thenew physics, and provides the most convincing scientific evidence yet that consciousnessplays an essential role in the nature of physical reality. And by the 1970s this idea, accordingto Davies, had finally percolated through to the layman 94 . Gell-Mann too, another “father”of the new sciences, recently pointed to the intellectual foundations laid by Gödel andHeisenberg 95 , while Uri Merry stated that the old paradigm is breaking down ‘under thecombined onslaught of the findings of quantum theory; Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle;Gödel’s theorem; the discoveries of chaos, complexity, self-organization, evolution,autopoeisis in living systems, and other breakthroughs in science’ 96 . In hindsight Boyd thuswas on solid grounds to base his work on the emerging worldview.Although Rifkin mentions Heisenberg and the Second Law in one chapter arguingthat ‘the static view of the worl has been replaced by the view that everything in the world isalways in the process of becoming’ 97 , few contemporaries however made the directconnection between thermodynamics, Heisenberg and Gödel. In light of the fact he readMonod 98 , Capra, Davies, Rifkin, Prigogine, Heisenberg and Gödel, and because he hadbecome intimately familiar with thermodynamics in Georgia Tech, it may not seem such aremarkable conceptual leap. It was however a genuine creative original act, most certainly inthe realm of military thought 99 .91 Boyd, Destruction and Creation, pp.8-9.92 And besides the already mentioned early works of Capra, etc., that are listed in the bibliographies ofhis first papers, his personal papers reveal an astounding number of books on the history of science.Early works that describe the stunning advances in physics in the first halve of the 20 th century includefor instance George Gamow Thirty Years That Shook Physics, The Story of Quantum Physics (1966), WernerHeisenberg's Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1962).93 Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (3 nd edition, 1991), p. 54. The first edition of 1975 already includedthis passage.94 Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (Penguin Books, 1990), pp.100-101. This book was firstpublished in 1983. Interestingly, Davies notes how ‘many modern writers are finding close parallelsbetween the concept used in the quantum theory and those of oriental mysticism, such as Zen’.95 Gell-Mann’s chapters 3 and 11, deal with information and quantum mechanics respectively.96 Uri Merry, Coping with Uncertainty, Insights from the New Sciences of Chaos, Self-organization and Complexity(Westport, Connecticut, 1995), p.100.97 Rifkin (1980), p.227.98 Monod held that living things as isolated self-contained energetic systems, seem to operate againstentropy, and that different life forms will battle against each other until a greater disorder takes overagain.99 Paul Davies had included the three in his 1983 book God and the New Physics. Prigogine included,besides Heisenberg and Gödel, explicitly the Second Law of Thermodynamics, however, this was inhis seminal work published in 1984 99 .99