What is Philip W. Anderson's central idea of 'more is different'?
The core of 'more is different,' as I articulated it, is a critique of the fallacy of puerile reductionism. It posits that as systems become more complex, new, qualitatively distinct properties and behaviors emerge that cannot be understood or predicted by merely examining the fundamental constituents in isolation. Think of it like this: the collective behavior of a stadium crowd – spontaneous applause, wave patterns – is utterly unlike the properties of any single person. Similarly, in solids, the collective quantum mechanical behavior of a vast number of electrons gives rise to phenomena like superconductivity, which are entirely absent at the level of individual electrons. The whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but fundamentally different.
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