Physicist and Nobel Prize Laureate Robert Laughlin visited Hopkins this week to speak in the 25th annual Brickwedde Lecture, addressing theories on emergent physical laws in large-scale events.
Laughlin's speech on Tuesday in Bloomberg's Schafler Auditorium kicked off the first of his three days on the Hopkins campus.
Laughlin, a professor of physics and astronomy at Stanford University and member of the National Academy of Science, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998 for contributing to the discovery of a new form of quantum fluid, also known as the Quantum Hall effect.
Currently promoting his new book, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, Laughlin gave a lecture titled "The Emergent Age," based on the theories explicated in his book.
Laughlin prefaced his lecture by pointing out the relevance of his ideas to the rest of the world.
"We have something to say to ordinary citizens that's actually very exciting," he said.
Laughlin first made the distinction between fundamental laws of physics and emergent laws, which are only true on large scales. He explained that physical laws, such as the laws of thermodynamics and the law of rigidity, are emergent - not applicable on a microscopic scale.
He argued that the principle of emergence is true of all physical laws. According to Laughlin, physical laws fall apart at the smallest of scales, including fundamental ideas such as Newton's laws and the laws of particle charge.
Laughlin acknowledged the difficulty of accepting the idea of emergence.
"Physicists are moralists, monotheists," he said. "We don't like it when ideas conflict."
Laughlin challenged scientists who claim that some laws, like those of relativity, are absolute.
"If you go down the list and ask `What is the proof that they just are?'" he said, "The answer in each case is that there is no proof, or that the proof is very suspicious. Our thinking of them as fundamental rather than emergent is simply ideology."
Laughlin then took some time to put his ideas into figures, all of which he drew himself, and some of which appear in his book. One image, for example, featured a girl skating on ice, and an unfrozen pond close by. Laughlin's point was that the only difference between the water and the ice was a large-scale difference - their crystalline pattern. Water and ice are identical at the small, atomic scale, yet very different to us.
Laughlin also took the opportunity to speak about some of the problems he sees today. He showed a picture of a family, dubbed "The Nuclear Family," which featured four people at a dinner table with atomic symbols for heads.
"For children my son's age, nuclear weapons have been mythologized," he said.
He warned that children who do not know the true terror of nuclear weapons will eventually be in positions of political power.
Laughlin ended his speech by telling the audience what he felt was the moral of his lecture.
"The moral here is that we live not in the Age of Biology, but in the Age of Emergence," he told the audience, describing how biological sciences have many theories today which seem to contradict each other, but how in emergent physics, there are no conflicts.
Laughlin's stay at Hopkins continued on Wednesday, where he met with students and faculty, and will commence on Thursday, when he will serve as the colloquium speaker for the weekly meeting of the physics department. His topic at the colloquium will be "Quantum Criticality and Black Holes."
The Brickwedde Lecture began in 1981 by a grant from Hopkins alum and Pennsylvania State University Dean Ferdinand G. Brickwedde, most famous for co-discovering deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen. The event is a three-day interaction between the visiting scientist, students and faculty.
