The good friend Fu Wocheng finally gave the entity book, this lets me admire very much. The moment I picked it up, I felt it was a big book, but given that it had been written a year before, and I had seen the first few editions, I felt it should be. The biggest drawback of this book is that it has a very title-worthy title, but in this noisy era, this is also an inevitable compromise, I know that such an immodest title, certainly not the author’s original intention.
Unlike the author’s previous e-books, such as “Borderline: Design Principles for Intelligence” and “How Artificial Intelligence is Designed”, this book is a solid physics popular science book. The book combines cutting-edge advances in physics with anecdotes from the history of science. This is not to say that the author has abandoned his usual references in this book, but that the author has made clear that the main line of the book is physics, and that the thinking derived from physics should not become dominant. It is a mark of his skill to exercise such restraint in writing.
The table of contents of this book is divided into four parts, except the last part introduces the frontiers of physics, the first three parts of the keywords symmetry, conservation and direction. Although I am not a student of physics, I cannot understand part of the book at first reading, but I think it is just the right difficulty. Any more difficult will become self-talk, but if it is simpler, no need for the reader to look up information, to think, it will become fast food reading, no mental gymnastics effect.
I once read a book about physical is the physical is the best life guide, this book is through physics theorem, to narrative is suitable for middle school students of life philosophy, such as through the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, the authors extended out is “if you want to attract someone’s attention, try like electrons, Make your behavior seem unpredictable to others, letting them know where you are, but not what you are doing? Or the other way around. Can only know one, can not know the other “, for example, through the law of conservation of energy leads, “life should not idle, once found himself in idle, change something to do”, but such a truth, there comparable to Fu Wocheng in the book gives a profound, next I will talk about physics and entrepreneurship what relationship. What kind of life wisdom can we get from physics?
Let’s first look at the authors wrote in the book’s prologue to understand physical three gap, the first is the high school physics, the physics just as stress analysis, the second is the problem of physical, namely according to have clearly defined problem solving, the third is the science of physics, such as such as ten thousand d just carved the “a brief history of time and a brief history of time” a wrote a novelty type view of physics. All three approaches fail to see the logic of physics itself. For physicists, the problem is how to use less mysterious theories to turn real problems into well-defined problems, how to use less precise tools to measure and calculate, and find correlations between the measured quantities. What does this mean for our daily lives? Just think about whether we’ve made similar mistakes when thinking about what entrepreneurship is. Do you see running a business as nothing more than the synthesis and decomposition of external forces, or business school examples, or the N principles of a startup book?
Went on to say that the first chapter of this book, this chapter is the question of the characteristics of the superconductor where it came from and why but the temperature is lower than the transition temperature, the material can be stable to exist in the superconducting state, the answer to this question is not a new particle in a superconductor, new forces, but constitute the symmetry is broken in the material material, From this, the author concludes that symmetry breaking can also explain the formation of mass, and that the pursuit of formal unity is a universal theme in physics research.
The breaking of symmetry is a dynamic process at the micro level, whose purpose is to keep the system always evolving as many possibilities as possible. Once the disturbance makes the system deviate from the original state, it can return to the original state without energy consumption. The breaking of symmetry indicates the high sensitivity and long range connections that are common in intelligent systems. The breaking of symmetry can explain many phenomena, indicating that when we explain many phenomena in daily life, it is not necessary to invent new concepts, but to pay attention to whether the changes of connections at the micro level will lead to complex macroscopic phenomena.
The second chapter of the book deals with the history, extension and recent challenges of the law of conservation of energy, such as the Casimir effect and virtual particles. The masterstroke of this chapter is a quote from Hu Shi, who says that philosophical and theological disputes are one hundred percent nouns. This, I think, is the author’s sigh as he sorts out the details of the history of science. “Nouns serve to construct intuitions,” the authors write. “When we are confronted with constructs that contradict our intuitions, we often exhibit irrational antipathy.”
By associating different phenomena with energy, conservation of energy allows us to use a set of rulers to measure problems in different situations. But the author goes on to quote Feynman, pointing out that the conservation of energy does not tell us how or why. Between symmetry and conservation laws, Noether’s theorem states that if physical laws are consistent in time, the energy of a system can be conserved. In time to keep the same rule, let a person remember the often said to beginner’s mind is different from the physical world, the law of the people variability determines its work is to change, adhere to the beginner’s mind, is to do things by the same rules, so that you and you create a system as a whole, will be conserved, the conservation of nature, can do long-term planning and forecasting.
The third chapter is entitled Information and Life, but it begins with the history of statistical mechanics. Life and information have one thing in common: they are irreversible. People can’t be revived after death, and their words are just like spilled water. For information, its uncertainty is reflected in the minimum description length. The more random information is, the more difficult it is to compress. The irreversibility is that whether my information is valuable or not depends on the information you have in advance, and the information gap is called KL relative entropy, which is common in machine learning. As for life, irreversibility is reflected in self-reference. KGB’s example is paradoxical precisely because life breaks such infinite recursion. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is reflected in the inevitable errors of self-replication, which leads to more ordered structures but also limits individual complexity, since a system’s complexity is always an order of magnitude higher than the subsystems it produces.
The chapter on Information and Life talks about the Gaia hypothesis and the sandpile model, and more importantly points out the correlation between the two models. In the Daisy world, different colors of chrysanthemums can keep the temperature of the earth in a stable system, but this stability also comes from the stability of the critical state. If the external temperature change is too drastic, changing the proportion of daisies with different colors may not be able to keep up with the changes in the environment in time. At this time, what needs to be done is to change the equilibrium point of exploration and utilization, and explore more when the environment changes dramatically, so as to obtain information more quickly. Isn’t that what founders call minimum cost trial and error?
One way to determine whether a life is advanced is to look at how much information a life can produce per unit of time. Physicist Jeremey England’s Work on dissipative structures suggests that the ordered structure of living things is one way they can dissipate energy more efficiently. With higher energy input from the outside, the system will be oriented to absorb and dissipate as much energy as possible, leading to the emergence of life. Such an explanation of life may seem counterintuitive, but considering the general premise of irreversibility, there is no possibility of constant change, so we can only deal with increasing complexity through uncertainty, and to create uncertainty requires energy dissipation. Similar rules apply to machine learning.
Here the author writes: “The point of the orderly structure of life is to consume and even waste resources as much as possible.” I disagree with this statement. I’ve talked about the second law of thermodynamics and Murphy’s law, and I’ve come up with Stoic things like, when bad things happen, it’s not a trick of the devil, you don’t have to curse or avoid them. But now it seems that neither extension is appropriate. There is no meaning or purposeful goal in the physical world. You can derive enlightenment on how to do things from physics, but you should not derive truth on what kind of life attitude you should have. For these things that cannot be said, it should be experienced by individuals.
In the last part of the book, tells the story of quantum entanglement, black holes and cosmology and unified under the information entropy theory, speak to the wormhole and many body problems such web celebrity topic, also points out that the tensor network hyperbolic space physics concepts and the connection between the deep learning, this chapter I think to write some short, many topics are just a passing mention, It is not stated what specific uses these concepts can produce. This is certainly due to the pioneering nature of the topic in this chapter, many studies are inconclusive, but it is better to grasp one point and make it clear than to skim over multiple topics. Therefore, reading this chapter, more is to inspire readers’ interest, do not do too much unnecessary association and deduction.
To sum up, this is a pure physics popular science book with a wide range of contents but a clear main line, simple language, stories, metaphors and rational analysis. The book’s boundary-crossing reflections from physics to life and intelligence are worth reading for students, college students, and professionals interested in physics, biology, and artificial intelligence. Finally, I wish Fu Wocheng this book is a big seller, so that he can have the motivation to create the next book, by the way, he recommended several e-books on Zhihu, although part of the content and this book overlap, but each book is interesting.
Read more (a reading note by Fu Wocheng)
Leap of life