What is emergence?
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the word &quot;emergence&quot;. In pop science, it was spoken in reverent tones. Never mind that they never gave a definition of it that didn&#x27;t sound trivial -- the word was dripping with meaning and the promise of hidden wisdom.<p>I went to college and studied physics. I learned how the behavior of many atoms leads to thermodynamics and the properties of materials. I learned how elementary quantum mechanics leads to atomic physics and chemistry. I learned how the strong force gives rise to nuclei. I learned how the Standard Model produces everything on this list. I learned how, at each layer, the correspondence was fiendishly subtle, but the work of thousands of physicists over decades had built the bridges.<p>At the end of it, I was still dissatisfied, because I hadn&#x27;t learned what <i>emergence</i> was. I&#x27;d see crackpots presenting their personal theories of everything, declaring that they knew what no physicist ever could, because their model had <i>emergence</i>. They knew about it, and we didn&#x27;t. But I still didn&#x27;t know what it was.<p>Then I dug deeper and it became obvious. Emergence is a beautiful idea that has <i>always</i> been present, in some form or another, in <i>every</i> field of science. It is so well-developed in some fields, such as particle physics, that it has become a suite of quantitative methods with incredible accuracy. I had been learning it the entire time, and now use it every day without a second thought. Meanwhile, &quot;emergence&quot; is a brand name. It&#x27;s a specific word passed down over generations of pop science used to convey mystique. It&#x27;s a tool some charlatans use to pretend they know more than they do.<p>No offense meant to the article, but I often hear people say they&#x27;re most excited about some substanceless theory because it &quot;has emergence&quot;, and this is part of why.