Been a while since I’ve actually written down stuff. I suppose everything is in full swing now—the book is begun, I’ve a better idea of what I want to do with my life, finals are in a couple of weeks. It’s actually quite frightening—as if I never have enough time.

This idea popped into my head around noon, but on further examination, I don’t know if I particularly like it anymore, but here goes.

Ideas (stories and scientific theories and everything in between) are rarely well described by their component parts. As if there were some mathematically describable principle that determines the relationship of the superstructure to the substructure.

The first idea that popped into my head is that you really don’t need to know/understand what quarks are in order to grok an electron. Knowing all about quarks doesn’t seem to give you any advantage with predicting electron behavior. The uncertainty is compounded when I remember that book There are No Electrons and realize that we really don’t know if electrons really exist. One way to look at it is as if electrons are not a sub-part of atoms, but are instead a characteristic of atoms that [explain] why chemistry works. (They are not classes in of themselves, but merely properties of the atom class.)

At the same time, they obviously do a decent job of describing electricity and fluorescence as well—Electrons are the elements that bind these diverse theories together, but knowing about electrons alone would not help you predict this behavior. I guess it’s about assigning the usefulness of a theoretical construct—when you think about [chemistry], the usefulness rests not solely in the properties of electrons, but in [their] relation to the atom—the superstructure cannot be predicted by the substructure.

I need to flesh this out more and try to make it more significant. I was going to apply this to the idea that knowing about cells doesn’t really help all that much with grokking the phenomenon of life, much less intelligent life, i.e., the usefulness factor (predictivity) is not particularly high. Aaargh. Need to think about it more.