Next Node Foment: my favorite elegant explanation

What’s your favorite “elegant explanation” of a specific science problem? Here’s mine:

Kepler’s planetary motion ellipses, Bohr’s electron shells, and Watson and Crick’s double helix are good examples of bringing a bolt of clarity and explanation to a specific scientific problem. Another level of explanatory power is ideas that are applicable on more of a universal basis to many phenomena thereby making sense of things at a higher order. Some examples of these ideas include: Occam’s Razor, the invisible hand, survival of the fittest, the incompleteness theorem, and cellular reprogramming.

Therefore some of the best explanations may have the parameters of being intuitively beautiful and elegant, offering an explanation for the diverse and complicated phenomena found in the natural universe and human-created world, being universally applicable or at least portable to other contexts, and making sense of things at a higher order. Fields like cosmology, philosophy, and complexity theory have already delivered in this exercise: they encompass many other science fields in their scope and explain a variety of micro and macro scale phenomena.

Next node foment is an idea inspired by complexity theory. As large complex adaptive systems move across time and landscape, they periodically cycle between order and chaos, in a dynamic progression of symmetry-attaining and symmetry-breaking. These nodes of symmetry are ephemeral. A moment of symmetry in a dynamic system is unstable because system forces drive progression away from the stuck state of Buridan’s ass and back into the search space of chaos towards the next node of symmetry. This is the process of life, of intelligence, of the natural world, and of complex man-made systems. Pressure builds to force innovation in the dynamic process or the system gains entropy and stagnates into a fixed state or death.

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