1. Atoms and aggregates

    I see science reversing the trend toward atomistic explanation that has been so triumphant in the last 400 years, and I predict a more human future based on the symbiosis of exact knowledge (which is by its very nature limited) and experience.

    ...Matter cannot be understood without a knowledge of atoms; yet it is now becoming evident that the properties of materials that we enjoy in a work of art or exploit in an interplanetary rocket are really not those of atoms but those of aggregates...It is not stretching the analogy much to suggest that the chemical explanation of matter is analogous to using an identification of individual brick types as an explanation of Hagia Sophia.

    1. ​The edifice from which they came​
  2. Whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt

    Aristotle’s 18 qualities of homoeomerous bodies that he chose to explain in detail in his Meteorologica, are just those fine points of behavior that would be noticed in a workshop. They are:

    solidifiable
    meltable
    softenable by heat
    softenable by water
    flexible
    breakable
    fragmentable
    capable of taking an impression
    plastic
    squeezable
    ductile
    malleable
    fissile
    curable
    viscous
    compressible
    combustible
    capable of giving off fumes

    This redundant list of properties is not the neat classification of a philosopher. It reads more as if it were based on a conversation with a workman whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt the intricacies of the behavior of materials.

  3. A holograph of itself

    All [physical properties of matter] derive from the different patterns of the interaction of electrons and photons within the fields of the positively charged atomic nuclei, stabilized in a particular morphology by the interaction of the levels themselves. Matter is a holograph of itself in its own internal radiation.

  4. To worship at the shrine of mathematics

    The new [physics-based] viewpoint is so potent that it has perhaps, caused too many metallurgists to forsake their partially intuitive knowledge of the nature of materials to worship at the shrine of mathematics, a trend reinforced by the curious human tendency to laud the more abstract.

  5. What the advancing interface leaves behind

    I see in the complex structure of any material—biological or geological, natural or artificial—a record of its history, a history of many individual events each of which did predictably follow physical principles. Nothing containing more than a few parts appears full panoplied, but it grows. And as it grows, the advancing interface leaves behind a pattern of structure perfection or imperfection which is both a record of historical events and a framework within which future ones must occur.

    1. ​From the head of Jove​
  6. A realization that this leaves out something essential

    Nothing so fundamental lies in the realm of concern to us aggregate humans, where the need is, now, for the study of real complexity, not idealized simplicity. In every field except high-energy physics on one hand, and cosmology on the other, one hears the same. The immense understanding that has come from digging deeper to atomic explanations has been followed by a realization that this leaves out something essential. In its rapid advance, science has had to ignore the fact that a whole is more than the sum of its parts.