(This is the third instalment in a series reconsidering the relationship between physics and “higher level” or emergent sciences. The others are here and here.)
A physics teacher recently told me that physics studies the very small and the very large. It’s a flattering folk definition, but if both ends, why not the centre? Why bind the grandest and most intricate scales into one discipline while leaving the middle to others? The real dividing line isn’t scale but scope. Physics generates the most generalisable descriptions and explanations.
By “generality” I mean a family of traits—breadth across materials and taxa, invariance under interventions and background changes, range across scales, and applicability beyond special set-ups. In these ways, electromagnetism scores extraordinarily high; homeostasis scores lower. Of course, it remains powerful within organised systems that satisfy its boundary conditions (Polanyi 1968). In this view, disciplines are profiles of generality, not boxes of subject matter.
This is about explanatory scope, not causal priority. Electromagnetism is certainly necessary for what cells do, but it is not sufficient to explain where and when mitochondria arose. That requires organisational closures, ecological niches, and histories—enabling constraints that actualise particular forms from the many physically possible ones. For more on this, visit my earlier post.
A mitochondrion or a homeostatic system arose through a combination of underlying causes and contingent contexts. Sometimes contexts create and ramify differences. For example, in an embryo, a cell at the centre encounters different signals than one at the edge; those differences cascade into differentiation, leading to cell specialisation, which diversifies context for the cells still further. In other cases, contexts buffer underlying differences, such as how morphogen gradients, membranes, and feedbacks stabilise some micro-trajectories over others. But in either case, the point is clear. The ‘middle’ of the universe, the place physics is seen to hand over to other disciplines, is where bottom-up causes and constraining contexts interplay. This is almost an inevitable consequences of being in the middle, of being made up of small constituent parts and participating in the co-constitution of larger entities.
One might assert physics is “special” because it is more general. But the idea that scientific knowledge is more important if it can be applied across more situations comes from a specific understanding of the purpose of knowledge. The more generalisable sciences are by definition less context dependent (or not context dependent at all) so they are also most amenable to prediction and manipulation. If we see the sciences as a spectrum between the nomothetic and the idiographic (Affifi 2019), we can also see that knowledge has different roles across the spectrum. Physics studies what is highly similar across contexts. On the other end of the spectrum, we have phenomena that is nearly absolutely unique and/or in a rapid process of unanticipated change. Across the spectrum, similarity and difference coexist in patterned ways. Between uniqueness and uniformity lie themes with variations: members of a species differ, yet share form. Where cross-context similarity is high, patterns tend to be stable and mathematisable. Where organisation and feedback dominate, sometimes richer mathematics or mixed-method modelling can capture what is happening. The world of precision medicine lies somewhere in this murky middle.
However, as we move towards the increasingly idiographic, manipulation becomes more risky and indeed stops making sense. For example, applying highly general knowledge inside idiographic settings brings side-effects when contextual relations are overlooked. This is one of the cardinal sins of our age of ecological disaster. But going further, as knowing increasingly becomes a kind of encounter with what is singular and unique, the desire to manipulate (wise of side-effects or not) becomes increasingly unthinkable. Along the spectrum, science can foster curiosity, admiration, care, gratitude, humility — and informed ignorance, as when new knowledge reveals uncertainties that were previously invisible. But it also help us recognise the limits of “knowing” as a way of engaging the world when conceived in its usual way of seeking stable explanations and expectations. We begin to think about knowing at this farther end as a mode of encounter, intimacy and participation.
Of course physics also contains diversity—phase transitions, chaos—just as biology contains recurring motifs—homeostasis, modularity, canalisation. We need to be careful about what we are claiming. However, even here the difference is clear. In biology, knowing the metapattern is not sufficient for predicting the phenomenon. We can understand homeostasis in abstract but be continuously surprised at the different ways in which organisms have evolved it across the kingdoms of life. Modelling faces trade-offs among generality, precision, and realism (Levins 1966): push one corner and you typically give on another. Physics often optimises generality (and precision) via abstraction; biological models often trade some generality for organisational realism or case-level precision.
Perhaps all I am doing is asserting that there is indeed something “special” about the special sciences. I think there is. But I am not saying that utilitarian exploitation is the only value of physics, even if it is perhaps the dominating one nowadays. I don’t want to be reductionistic about reductionism. But even within physics, a fixation on manipulation can occlude other human possibilities that general physics can offer us from the sense of its sublime universality (Affifi 2024) to the very mysteries it confronts us with when contemplating the relation between our living, feeling world and the necessity of natural law. The point isn’t to enthrone a level, but to recognise different profiles of generality and the different virtues and limits that come with them.
References
Affifi, R. (2024). The ecology of sublimity: Education between existence and the ungraspable. Environmental Education Research.
Affifi, R. (2019). Restoring realism: Themes and variations. Environmental Education Research.
Levins, R. (1966). The strategy of model building in population biology. American Scientist.
Polanyi, M. (1968). Life’s irreducible structure. Science 160(3834), 1308-1312.
Discover more from Ramsey Affifi
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.