The
buzz about Theoretical Sociophysics: the matter for, and the time to expand,
theoretical physics
“Well I think the key
thing is to acknowledge the role of culture but not to treat it as some
autonomous force, some surrounding gas, or some force like gravity that just magically causes people to behave.”[1] - Steven Pinker (my
emphasis)
“Across the millennia,
the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to
you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together
people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the
shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”[2]
– Carl Sagan (my emphasis)
Any
theoretical physics without an adequate response to what culture is, and how it
relates to information, matter, mass, time, meaning, laws, and reality is a
theoretical physics that is fundamentally short. This discussion paper on the
new discipline of theoretical
sociophysics unveils the range of this approach, and how the social
sciences can offer physics additional insight with powerful parallels between
the virtual/social dimension and the physical dimension. Moreover, it can improve
the outreach of this fuller, rounder, more applied physics to the wider
scientific, and non-scientific communities. This discussion paper is not about
how culture ‘magically’ does anything. It is about getting to grips with
culture’s underlying causality, the mechanics and ultimately the measurement of
culture(s). In this process new insights are provided on a range of key areas
and relationships across theoretical physics.
The
origin of theoretical sociophysics is part of a wider attempt to realise the
accepted theory of culture. In connecting and unifying the social sciences
along one epistemological dimension it is then possible, indeed rigour demands
this, to bridge into the neighbouring natural and physical layers to fully
discover the limits of culture. Theoretical sociophysics is the bridging
discipline. It is BIG04 (Big Ideas Group) within eleven such BIGs. Before we
concentrate on the range of theoretical sociophysics it is important to see
where it fits within the range of the other BIGs and the wider development of
human knowledge.
the
BIGs
BIG01.Expression:
the theory of culture connecting and unifying the arts, humanities and social
sciences. This is a process of expression, not evolution.
BIG02.Making Sense of Mind:
Culture operates in relative concert with mind. Not primordial, or proto-mind,
but mind (proper). It is the seat of human creativity and control and it merits
sensehood.
BIG03.Postmodern Synthesis:
From expression it is possible to bridge into the natural sciences,
sophisticating evolutionary theory, even to the point of a general theory of
nature.
BIG04.Theoretical Sociophysics:
It is possible to bridge into the physical sciences where the virtual/social
dimension offers new insights into the physical dimension and a deeper
understanding of how time, meaning and information work.
BIG05.Theory of Knowledge (The Berger
Table): Just as there is a periodic table for elements, there
is a structure to knowledge which we can tabulate in similar fashion. The
Berger Table.
BIG06.Personas Culturis-Naming
Matters: The branch of (human) biography that comes from the
tree of life means we need a more reflective species name for the 100s of ways
of being human. Personas culturis is a fuller, more accurate name for our
species. Naming matter, and this is who we are.
BIG07.The Technoosphere:
The technology networking and supporting modern life is not the biosphere, it
is the technoosphere, of which the internet is but a part. This BIG illuminates
this sphere.
BIG08.Social Capitalism & Range
Economics: Capitalisms are economic systems of accumulation and
allocation. We need a form of capitalism that has less creative destruction,
and this is the answer.
BIG09.Nobels & and Economic &
Social Science Prize: This body of work comes from the social
sciences and in the light of this the Nobels need to reflect the power of
social sciences in their prizes.
BIG10.The God Question:
How God is human? This BIG challenges people of faith & science. God (real or not) has a part to play in
understanding culture, and our relationship to nature & knowledge.
BIG11.Easter Planet:
Culture is different but not detached from the natural world. This BIG takes a
‘nature’s-eye view’ and the promotion of an 11th Commandment to
recommit to the natural world.
The
Social Sciences and Physics
I
embarked on this enterprise in 1995/96 while I was a 3rd year
undergraduate in the social sciences studying mainly sociology. In Berger &
Luckmann’s 1966 The Social Construction
of Reality, they suggest the possibility of a sociological psychology and I
took this as a challenge to connect these two subjects through my MA thesis ‘A
Sociology of Human Agency: Understanding Action’. My focus at this time, and
since is on the human world. I am not a physicist, and even less a
mathematician. Having said that, as I begin to outline the underlying mechanics
of how culture works, how this leads to the discovery of placetime and how it
interacts with meantime, through to the equation for all culture and even
giving culture(s) a speed, I’ve arrived there through theory, wide reading,
focus to the point of obsession at times and using a system of diagrams that
help display these actions and interactions in an accessible way. These are a
social science version of Feynman-like diagrams showing these fundamental
interactions. If you are a physicist or mathematician reading this and thinking
there are a lot of words here, I am aware of that. The quest(ion) here in
discovering the underlying mechanics is to (a) get there, (b) to the level
where it can be defended at all points from experts in your field, and
neighbouring fields, and (c) be able to express these fundamental interactions
in as simple a form as possible to the widest possible audience. So, I will ask
for a little patience just for a few pages as I showcase this exciting new
subject, for the social and physical sciences, and interested layperson.
The
fundamental challenge of the physical sciences is to unite the world of the
very small (quantum) with the world at the very large scale (gravity), and in
the social sciences the challenge at the deepest level is similar. The
difference is that we are uniting the small of individual/mind, and big of society/culture.
Sociology as a term was named by Auguste Compte after his preferred option
‘social physics’[3]
had already been coined by Adolphe Quetelet. Quetelet had a deep interest in
measurement, applying statistics to the world of social phenomena. Indeed, the
BMI (Body Mass Index) was invented by him, and is also known as the Quetelet
Index. While the physics goal of a theory of everything is a fairly commonplace
one in popular culture, the idea of a theory of everything across the social
world is one that is rarely taken up. Indeed, as this quote from eminent
anthropologist Clifford Geertz states, it is discouraged.
“Though those with what
they take to be one big idea are still among us, calls for “a general theory”
of anything social sound increasingly hollow, and claims to have one
megalomaniac. Whether this is because it is too soon to hope for unified
science or too late to believe in it is, I suppose, debatable.”[4]
Ten years before writing this Geertz commented on the ‘terrifying
complexity’[5] of such a general theory, a theory of everything across the social
sciences, arts and humanities. While the social sciences have traditionally
avoided this, from the natural sciences there have been 10+ schools of thought
from the evolutionary perspective that have tried to Darwinise culture. Despite
this concerted, consistent attempt they have all failed to generate an accepted
theory of culture. In trying to understand this terrifying complexity from a
more systems and information theory approach the Research
Committee on Sociocybernetics (RC51) of the International Sociological
Association, began in 1980.[6] While RC51’s Journal of Sociocybernetics stopped in
2016, a secondary journal Cybernetics and
Human Knowing[7]
remains.
From
the physical sciences on the social, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking wrote
in 2010 that “philosophy is dead.”[8] It is difficult to imagine
a unified theory of the social world without significant contribution from
philosophy, and as Professor Hawking hasn’t offered anything substantial as an
alternative that claim looks a little premature. He and other physicists have
commented on the current state of humankind’s impact on the planet. This year
in the BBC’s ‘Stephen Hawking: Expedition New Earth’ he predicts that the human
race only has one hundred years before we need to colonise another planet. This
echoes the concerns of former Astronomer Royal, cosmologist Martin Rees’ book Our Final Century who gives humankind a
50/50 chance of making it to the end of the century[9]. When theoretical
physicist Richard Feynam’s lecture series on “A Scientist Looks at Society”
went to press, it was entitled The
Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist[10].
As interesting as these contributions are they cannot tell you about the
mechanics of culture. Physics can’t tell you about how the cultural causation
of meaning works, but theoretical sociophysics can. So while Professor Hawking
has written about the psychological arrow of time in relation to the thermodynamic
arrow, only a fuller understanding of how meantime and placetime interact can
yield the necessary next level insight on time’s workings.
The
idea that the physical sciences can garner new, deeper insights into time,
information, even reality from the social sciences at first glance might seem
bemusing. Allow me to de-bemuse. Think on these core terms for a moment. Relativity,
time, information, mass, laws, meaning, gravity, system, spin and reality. They
all seem very “physicsy” for want of a better term. Not only are they all used
across the social sciences, they are all terms that the physical sciences have
appropriated from the social world. In the light of physical theories being
realised, while unified social theories are not, they seem more physicsy than
social. That is an inversion of history and one that we have to unweave to a
point. ‘Seeming’ is what minds do, and beyond being physicists and/or
mathematicians you are also humans brought up in a culture of wider knowledge,
and knowledge that has come from a very particular history. That fosters, and accultures
a kind of seeming that is in line with what Professor Hawking has called “model
dependent realism”. The models upon which this realism is dependent is the
human mind, or ‘observer’ as physics refers to. When Berger & Luckmann
wrote The Social Construction of Reality in
1966, what they were not aware of is that reality is a social construction. That is to say that reality is not everything for physics to go out and
explain, but reality is a very human
something, individually and collectively. Simply put, all animals and
plants have a range of action, a range of actuality. The human range of
actuality is reality.
The
Trilectic
Enough
with the words, it’s time for some diagrams. Narrative is fine to a point, but
we’re dealing in meta-narrative here. Traditionally, the relative concert
between mind and culture has been a dialectical one. Minds/individuals
influence culture/society and in turn culture/society influences
minds/individuals. We can display this like this:
For
hundreds, if not thousands of years this simple relationship has been the basis
of social science theory. It is incomplete. This has resulted in a wealth of
theory and narrative to fill in the missing element(s) of this dialectic. That
historical body of work has been a world of hit and miss, insight, and language
that is often overly technical. As a sociology undergraduate we were exposed to
Talcott Parsons’ structural functionalism, and Anthony Giddens ‘structuration’.
We’re dealing with the human world and if the language we are using drifts too
much into instruction manual mode then I think we’re straying from the very
subject matter we’re interested in, namely humans and culture. There is
something missing, and what is missing in this dialectical relationship of
cause & effect, effect & cause is memory.
We
need memory. What we need is a recording & loading mechanism that can more
fully account for the cultural system. Here is a diagram that displays this new
dynamic.
Humankind
creates artefacts. More precisely, we can’t stop
creating artefacts. They are artificial, human-made and unnatural. Look around
you, the room you are in is artificial, and so too are all the things that fill
that room, including books, pictures, wires, furniture, computer(s), etc. Even
these words that you are reading right now are all part of the external human
world of memory that is recorded by someone, and loads back for everyone. This
new relationship is no longer the dialectic, but the trilectic. This system has
emerged from the natural world and is no longer an evolutionary process, but
one of expression.
(1) Nature
doesn’t make the artificial, that comes from human expression.
(2) Nature
doesn’t decide what sticks around, or not, that comes from human expressed
interest.
(3) Expression
is an increasingly quickening process as we create more artefacts, and they in
turn drive humans. This revolution upon revolutionary process was why noted
evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould called culture “the Lamarckian
juggernaut”.
(4) Evolution
is not all change, it is a very specific kind of change in the nature setting.
This accounts for why evolutionary theory has never managed to generate an
accepted theory of culture, and never will. If we are reducing the fundamental
character of constancy and change in the culture system down to a single term
than that term has to be absolutely correct. It has to be true. It is not
evolution, it is expression.
From
my work on nature, mind and then time the trilectic had much deeper explanatory
power than just the social world of humankind. It pointed towards a re-shift in
how we see the world around us. It was no longer a world of cause & effect,
but a world of cause, effect & memory. I would go on to realise that
evolutionary theorist Richard Lewontin’s triple helix understanding of nature was
conducive to trilectic thinking. While he displayed it through a pair of differential
equations (and I have mentioned I don’t really do equations) I was able to frame
it in terms of trilectic.
“Taken together, the
relations of genes, organisms, and environments are reciprocal relations in
which all three elements are both causes and effects. Genes and environments
are both causes of organisms, which are, in
turn, causes of environments, so that genes become causes of environments
as mediated by the organisms.”[11] (my emphasis)
I
was then able through my work on the human mind to apply the trilectic to the
mind. We have an aggregate (field of experience), a preserving quality/force
(conscious mind), and the memory (unconscious mind).
When
we refer to ‘mind’ it is actually our conscious mind’s current understanding,
informed by experience and memory, of the wider process of consciousness (human
seeming) positioned from within our heads. At this stage it is beneficial to
see a series of these diagrams telling the story of life on earth solely
through trilectic illustration.
I
wanted to explore the limits to the trilectic model and this took me on to the
issue of time. We’re dealing with the dimension of culture which has emerged
from the natural world. New dimensions bring with them new phenomena. There was
a time before nature, and before life in the physical universe. As the nature
dimension emerged, so to it came life. As culture emerged, so too did their own
causal processes, namely meaning and time. For theoretical sociophysics before
there was time there was temporal sequence. Time is something qualitatively
different. I’ll display this as a trilectic.
Humans
record/express their experience into a world around them. This is the human
memory all around us. Think of the entire social world around you as a living
museum and that is a good shorthand to understanding placetime. Placetime is the entire recorded world of humankind. Around
the world the most common newspaper and magazine title is a variation on
‘Times’, and this is testimony to (a) human recording ability, and (b)
differences in the way different cultures record their experience. The effect,
the ‘meaning’ of that world (or placetime) on us in the now, is meantime (for the time being). Through the field of experience
placetime collapses into meantime, which in turn, makes and maintains placetime
all around us. This is the circuit, the current that theoretical sociophysics
is focused on.
A
conversation is a good way to understand this interaction. Let’s say that you
and I send emails back and forth in a conversation. I am writing in the now of
my meantime, which relative to you is your placetime. The conversation is
dynamic and its form is constantly reforming and ‘in formation’, and this is
the mid-state between meantime and placetime.
If
you are in any doubt that this process exists then think about a major reason
why people go abroad on holiday. To “soak up the local culture” is to go to a
different culture, a different time and experience that. Placetime as the
recording, the expression, and meaning (meantime) as your realtime impression. Different
places have different feels. We are the only species from hundreds of millions
of different kinds of species that do not have a natural environment. We don’t
live in environments, we live in times and this is something that theoretical
physics needs to be aware of and something theoretical sociophysics can help
with. The different fields of experience all around us that are the interplay
of placetime and meantime I refer to as feel’ds.
This is testimony to cultural theorist Raymond Williams observation that
culture is ‘the structure of feeling’. Feel’ds are dynamic arenas of sights and
sounds all around us. They are not uniform environments triggering biological
instincts in us like all other animals and plants, but a different dimension
with its own cultural causation. We can learn all about the natural and
physical worlds and they won’t be able to explain fully time or meaning with an
understanding of this level of causation.
In
formation
Placetime
is the world of form around us. The meantime of now is always reforming. This
dynamic is in constant reformation, and ‘in formation’, and this leads us onto
the area of information. For theoretical sociophysics information is:
1. The
interaction of placetime and meantime ‘in formation’
2. Informing
motion
3. Informing
action
We
need to understand the laws of motion and notion of culture. Culture has a
number of speeds: Repetitive, reforming, radical, revolutionary and reverse
(retro) gears. Spin is not just a physical sciences term, it is also a term
used in social science, in particular media theory. Spin for theoretical
sociophysics is about working through the information cycle/circuit to see if
there is a spin up/down parallel in the virtual world, within a more general
move to make all levels of social world phenomena knowable and accessible in an
ever increasing spinning, information age. To talk of “an information age” is
to comment on a quickening pace of culture, with more causal weight, more
gravity in what we do, rather than looking
to the biological or social structures around us. Going back to the idea of
culture as conversation, this gives us more weight in our communication to, in
turn perhaps realise the need for change, and in turn, affect that change. Simply
put, in an information age there is the potential for more things to be up for
discussion, or negotiation. Animals and plants are not afforded this kind self-change,
this self-causation of meaning. Quantum information theorist Vlatko Vedral
refers to “mutual information”[12] and he is actually
commenting on meaning, human level information. We can see this manifest in
human laws over time and place. Laws, not physical or natural laws, can and do
change, shaping behaviour as a result of these laws. In my lifetime there are
not just changes in formal laws, but on rights concerning females, people’s
ethnicity (apartheid for example), gay rights and currently transgender rights.
These all come from changing conversations within and across generations.
Way,
weigh, wait, weave & wave of life
I’m
skipping ahead somewhat here. I have a vast body of theory on all of this and
while the diagrams make it clearer and more concise, I’m trying to keep this
discussion paper about the range of theoretical physics as short as possible.
Returning to the terms that we referred to at the beginning they are all terms
that are embedded in this dynamic virtual/social dimension all around us. For
evolutionary theory culture is non-biological information. For social science
culture is “a way of life”, but that is really a different way of framing the
questions. What is a way of life then? For theoretical sociophysics culture is:
1. a
way of life: relative to your individual and cultural experience.
2. a
weigh of life: artefacts, and the sights and sounds of one culture might mean
almost everything to one person, and mean almost nothing to someone from a
different culture. Meaning for theoretical sociophysics is the (virtual) gravitational
social. Artefacts, including words for example have a weight and with enough
understanding, and the equation we are going to get to shortly, this is
something we can move towards measuring. There is a relationship between the
gravitational social and mass in the social (virtual) world and an
understanding of this relationship can offer new insights to studies into these
areas for physical science. If anything I am writing at this point has any
weight for you, then it has meaning for you.
3. a
wait of life: the mind frames each moment in a particular way, with a weight
attached to every visible part. As the minds stitches each frame to the next
frame, moment to the next moment, we create momentum. The speed of this
occurring is important, but also the lack of pace. ‘Time dragging’ is a real
state of human experience that theoretical sociophysics can explain more fully.
4. a
weave of life: the weave here is the social fabric of/as reality. In the mind
this is the seaming of experience into the unconscious mind, and in culture the
interaction of the invisible fabric between placetime and meantime, we refer to
as information.
5. a
wave of life: in 1920 Albert Einstein gave a lecture/address on Ether and the Theory of Relativity at University
of Leiden[13],
In this he refers to a number of ethers, and action at a distance. For
theoretical sociophysics, action at a distance comes from the networked artefacts
all around us, and there is only the Williams Ether (after Raymond Williams).
The feel’d of experience between placetime and meantime, is one of waves of
sight and sound, although all relatively meaningful.
Energy
& Equation
By this
time in our way through theoretical sociophysics as a BIG (Big Idea Group)
we’re more comfortable with the underlying mechanics of culture, and the
dynamics of how it works. At this time we can understand more the first law of
cultural expression.
“A cultural expression is equal to the sum total of all unfolding
impressions.”
With all
that we have covered, it is possible to display the relative concert between
culture and mind, this ‘mix’ as an equation: Y≈mt²+c. I was working on this for sometime and then came across the
BBC documentary presented by Jim Al-Khalili on Chaos Theory,[14]with an
equation for chaos very similar to the one I was working on for the chaotic,
meterology-like system of cultures ebb and flow.
I’ll repeat
that I’m no mathematician but I have such a handle on culture that is possible
to convey it in equation-like terms.
Y is the sum total of all energy
that humans consume.
≈ is the
ebb and flow, with this feedback illustrated as a wave for accuracy.
mt is meantime, although this could
be just t for time.
c is the speed of human cognition,
the oscillator in this ebb and flow of information and meaning.
The notion
of energy use within this equation came from reading Buckminster Fuller’s idea
of ‘energy slaves’. Just like cars have brake horse power (bhp), so too for
quicker, more developing cultures we can talk about the extra human power, or
‘energy slaves’. If a culture has no technology and only uses manual labour
then they’ll operate at 1.0 energy slave. If we take a more modern, westernised
culture with a world of artefacts around them to support, including a vast
array of technology then they energy slave level could be as much as 150. What this means for the equation, and for a
‘natures-eye view’ is that if all 7.5 billions got up tomorrow and lived to the
150 level then nature would feel the pressure of not 7.5 billion humans, but
over one trillion humans. That is an order of magnitude bigger, and using the
equation Y≈mt²+c we could imagine a
time that a culture’s (or nation’s) impact/speed could be measured, even
keeping it within agreed international limits.
As
with any claim to new approach, and/or paradigm shift in knowledge, it takes
time to be accepted. I am going to post this on my blog, and academia page as
well as sending this out to a range of institutions and people around the world
who might be interested. Then I’ll get to work on a discussion paper for
another of the BIGs, keeping in mind that theoretical sociophyics, as fruitful
as it is, is only one of eleven BIGs I have, and continue to work. I think
there is plenty of scope for partnership, and development of theoretical
sociophysics as a bridging discipline giving social science more insight into
the workings of culture and the areas covered here. Moreover, for theoretical
physics I think there exists an opportunity to tap into this work in terms of
outreaching this more human-level physics, using the trilectic to understand
time to a different, deeper level, even to the point where we can mathematise
the work outlined here to see if the maths can take us to the edge of time, and
even speculate beyond it. Certainly, going forward I don’t think it will be
possible in the future to fully understand time without a working awareness of
meantime, placetime and how they interact.
Thank
you for “your time”. (which is a theoretical sociophysics level understanding)
Mark
Cowan
the
BIG institute
KICKSTARTER
PROJECT PAGE
[1]
Pinker, Steven. (1998). The Darwin Debate. Available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjJAwbc5IaE Last accessed 26th Oct 2014.
11mins13secs-11mins25secs. This debate was chaired by Melvyn Bragg and included
Steven Pinker, Jonathan Miller, Steve Jones and Meredith Small. It was held at
The Linnean Society of London, Piccadilly, London. According to this tv
database website it aired on BBC2 on 1st January 1998. http://thetvdb.com/?tab=episode&seriesid=79660&seasonid=60871&id=609891&lid=7
[2]
Sagan, Carl. (1980). Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Episode 11 "The
Persistence of Memory". Available:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkQEnRDhPUU. Last accessed 26th Oct 2014. The You
Tube video is a short clip of this quote, and part of the 13 episode Cosmos series broadcast between 28th
Sept 1980 to 21st Dec 1980. Episode 11 was ‘aired’ across The
Williams Ether on the 7th Dec 1980.
[3]
Quetelet, Adolphe (1835). Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés,
ou Essai de physique sociale. 2 volumes. This included Essays on social physics was translated into English in 1842 as
‘Treatise on Man’. What I have to offer marries the necessary level of
theoretical insight from Compte’s qualitative approach to Sociology, with
Quetelet’s statistical and quantitative focus. I’m keen to state and re-state
that the notion of an equation for culture is a liberating one and not a
depressing one. Understanding that we are not tellingly under the instruction
of genetic code but through ‘mutual information’ (Vlatko Vedral’s 2001 Decoding Reality, Oxford University
Press) and this new realm of negotiated causation we call reality. We create
reality. We can think about it. We can measure it as well.
[4]
Geertz, Clifford (1983). Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive
Anthropology. London: Fontana Press. p4. (1993 print version)
[5]
Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays.
New York: Basic Books. p54.
[6]
Journal of Sociocybernetics. https://sociocybernetics.wordpress.com/journal-of-sociocybernetics/,
Last accessed 4th Sept 2017.
[7]
Cybernetics and Human Knowing. http://www.imprint.co.uk/product/chk/,
Last accessed 4th Sept 2017.
[8]
Hawking, Stephen & Mlodinow, Leonard (2010). The Grand Design.
London: Bantam Press. P5. Hawking follows up this quite ridiculous statement
with “Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science,
particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of
discover in our quest for knowledge.” Expression utilises all the skills and
subjects from the social sciences, arts and humanities and philosophy is one of
them. Expression is not a product of physics but of critical thinking and
rigour from the social sciences so the very notion that Hawking proclaims
philosophy is an extreme, and erroneous statement to make.
[9]
Rees, Martin (2003). Our Final Century. London: Arrow Books. The full
title of the book is Our Final Century:
Will Civilisation Survive the Twenty-First Century? In part, the
ineffectiveness of the social sciences to express what people, including
academics from neighbouring domains feel (and seem) invites them on, in a very
real sense, to write about areas which are located along the social
epistemological spectrum.
[10]
Feynman, Richard (1998). The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen
Scientist . Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Helix Books. It is a collection of
three previously unpublished public lectures given by Feynman the University of
Washington in April, 1963. In the words of Theoretical Sociophysics this book
would be called The Causal Impression of
It All.
[11] Lewontin,
Richard (2001). The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment.
London: Harvard University Press. p100-101.
[12] Vedral,
Vlatko (2010) Decoding Reality: the universe
as quantum information. New York: Oxford University Press. Mutual information is
what theoretical sociophysics highlights as a new kind of causation: meaning.
[13] Einstein,
Albert. (1922). Ether and the Theory of Relativity. Available: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Einstein_ether.html
Last accessed 4th Sept 2017.
Einstein gave an address/lecture in German on 5th May 1920 at the University of
Leiden.
[14] Al-Khalili,
Jim (2012) The Secret Life of Chaos. BBC,
44mins 57seconds.