Pieces

One of the great surprises of my childhood was learning how to read music notation and realizing that all music is reducible to mere notes. This may seem absurd to a lot of people; after all, what else would music be reducible to? But at the time it was incomprehensible to me that music is reducible at all. Music comprises a wide spectrum of sound, from the grandeur of a multi-movement orchestral symphony to the simplicity of a solo voice singing a folk song, from the pop music on the radio to the sounds of my sister's piano practice emanating from downstairs those years ago. Not all music appeals to me, but of the kinds that do they seem too special—too magical—to be made of the same building blocks as are other forms of music.

Some wholes are greater than the sum of their parts, and music is one example of such a gestalt whole. Without prior training and experience to know any better, how could one predict the utter difference between a C-G chord and a C-F# chord? One sounds open and pure, the other harsh like a car horn. Yet the three notes played individually each sound plain and ordinary. The individuals give no clue as to what their combined form will be.

Music is only one such emergent behavior, and one of the overarching joys of my life has been discovering and learning about how everything else that's special and amazing we see in the universe is similarly made up only of simple building blocks. One such other whole that's greater than the sum of its parts is modern computing and software. This may seem mundane to a lot of people, but by the fact that you're reading this blog post means you see at least the effects of the magic in front of you right now. Use Wolfram Alpha to search for distance to the sun in inches or use Google Maps to search for a bike-friendly route to the nearest pizza place: to such fuzzy questions you'll get answers in fuzzy English, but under the hood it's nothing but ones and zeros—which is to say it's just electrons getting pushed to and fro in circuit boards. How can anyone look at a bag of transistors and capacitors and other electronic components and see the Internet arising from such simple parts? I suspect no one really does, but it's important that we try.

In his book Six Easy Pieces, the physicist Richard Feynman writes:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.