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Emergent Properties of Matter, Part 1: The Making of a Masterpiece
As the Coldplay song "Don't Panic" says, "We live in a beautiful world." David J. Hill agrees. And he expounds on this idea in his first article in a two-part series dealing with the phenomenon of emergent properties.
Experiencing the Masterpiece
Imagine you're wandering through an array of stoic paintings in a museum. Retirees and field-trip children crisscross past art students busily making sketches. The life's work of so many expired artists is splayed across the walls while a security guard looks on like a funeral director. Amidst the big-ticket sterility, you suddenly spot something alive amongst the dead. You briskly walk over to fill your entire field of vision with this thing … this masterpiece.
Everyone has experienced this at some point in time: the identification of something extraordinary amidst the mundane. Maybe it's a striking sunset or a magnificently written book. Whether natural or man-made, there are those things that grab our attention with their uniqueness and extraordinary quality.
So what is it about a building, a symphony, or even a speech that generates the sense that you are witnessing a masterpiece? This is clearly a challenging question to answer, but it seems that the one common component among masterpieces is the presence of an emergent property.
What is an Emergent Property?
An emergent property is a characteristic of any system that is not easily accounted for by considering the parts of the system individually. Essentially, it's the idea of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Furthermore, an emergent property can seem so distant from the parts that make up the whole that it almost seems disconnected from them.
Think of "The School of Athens" by Raphael, "Starry Night" by Van Gogh, or any other painting considered a masterpiece. Though we know a masterpiece painting consists of, well, paint for one thing, it is difficult to imagine that the painting was made, that it was composed by a person over time rather than having just always existed on its own. In one sense, that a painting should be labeled as 'timeless' is a reflection of that unique and extraordinary quality that transcends its physical components. This transcendence is the painting's emergent property.
But notice that there is a distinction between the strictly physical properties of the work of art and those that emerge beyond the physical. Although we know that a painting consists of particular pigments and media, patterns in which those materials are arranged, and the technique used to arrange those patterns, there is more to art than this. Reducing a masterpiece to its physical properties might enlighten us on how it was made. But at the same time, it can strip us of our sense of awe. There's no better evidence for this than remembering the awe from the first time you saw a masterpiece and how even a slight familiarity with it can diminish the effect.
Are masterpieces only found in the realm of art? Clearly not, if we can experience a similar awe looking at a waterfall as we do when looking at a painting of it. The amazing thing about the world around us is that emergent properties exist from the smallest components of matter to the largest, such as galaxies. In light of this, many might even call recent pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope "masterpieces."
What Did We Get Out of Chemistry Class, Anyway?
For many students, the periodic table is an exercise in grotesque memorization. Here we have more than 100 symbols representing names with numbers that we have to stuff in our heads in order to regurgitate it onto a piece of paper to demonstrate what … understanding? comprehension? scientific reasoning?
Almost universally recognized as a waste of time, memorizing the periodic table negates what it was created to visually capture: the nature of matter. It's no surprise, then, that many students make it through an entire chemistry class without ever experiencing a moment of awe like they might with a painting in art class. In fact, many students walk away with only a vague notion of the structure matter.
Atoms: The Building Blocks of Matter
Put simply, matter is made of discrete elements defined by the number of protons it consists of. The center of the atom, called the nucleus, contains the protons, along with a varying number of neutrons, which lack charge and help to stabilize the protons that disfavor being so close to one another. Protons are particles that are positively charged and require negatively charged electrons to balance them out. Electrons orbit in different paths around the nucleus, depending on their energy state.
When it comes to the paths that electrons can take, certain rules — courtesy of the conceptually challenging reality of quantum mechanics — dictate what is allowed. The consequence of these rules is fairly simple: There is a preferred number and organization of electrons around a nucleus, depending on the number of protons and electrons present. So, from any two adjacent elements on the periodic table, there is one proton and one electron difference between them. But the added electron has a unique energy state that has an enormous impact on the properties of the element. The periodic table is a convenient way, then, to arrange the elements according to the number of protons in their nucleus and group according to the energy states of their electrons.
Now, there are certain elements with some unusual properties, but many properties of the elements reflect periodic trends that are present among elements with similar numbers of protons or similar organizations of electrons.
Matter's Emergent Properties
So, what do elements have to do with masterpieces of art?
Well, in the same way that a masterpiece of art is not just paint organized into a pattern on a canvas, it turns out that the majority of matter is made up of molecules, which are atoms of specific elements organized in different arrangements, and that these molecules show incredibly different properties than their elements. In fact, the properties of many molecules are so different that the molecule takes on its own identity. In other words, many of a molecule's properties transcend the elements that it consists of.
One of the best examples is water: H2O, a combination of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. The properties of water are quite different from these elements.1 For example, water molecules attract other water molecules and form tight interactions, whereas hydrogen and oxygen individually do not demonstrate this property. It takes a lot of energy to break apart these water molecules to turn them into a gas. This is the reason that water exists as a liquid and has a high boiling point, while hydrogen and oxygen each have low boiling points. Water's unique properties as "the solvent of life" emerge in a way that cannot easily be connected to the utter simplicity of its parts without significantly diminishing its identity as a molecule.
Water is a simple molecule with a mass and volume similar to its elements. If, however, we examine larger and more complex molecules, we see emergent properties that are even more distant from the properties of the elements that they consist of.
DNA is a molecule with astounding properties, even with the small variety of elements that it incorporates (there are only five, in fact: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus). All of the genes that make up humans are stored in our double-helical DNA until the body needs to access the genetic information to make proteins, which are the machinery of cells. The genetic information is stored as a four-letter code whose sequence from beginning to end is read very much in the same way that we read a sentence: There's a beginning and an end and everything in between is broken up into meaningful words. In the end, DNA is practically impossible to deconstruct because its properties are so far greater than its comprising elements.
Masterpieces Everywhere ...
The truly amazing thing is that we discover masterpieces in every state of matter and every level of life. Emergent properties arise because, in these natural systems, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Considering the awe that we experience when we look at the world around us, can it really be that they are merely a consequence of the organization of matter? Doesn't the aesthetic seem to emerge from nature intentionally?
C O F F E E S H O PDo the emergent properties
we see in nature point to
Intelligent Design?
Join the discussion!
In my next article, we will continue to examine the idea of emergent properties — beginning with cells and extending to larger systems — so that we might gain a fuller appreciation for the collection of masterpieces abundant in the natural world.
- Hydrogen and oxygen are actually diatomic elements meaning that they exist in nature as molecules with two atoms bonded to one another (H2 and O2). The properties of hydrogen and oxygen in these forms are well known. As a single atom, the properties of hydrogen (H) are also well known but the properties of oxygen (O) are more difficult to determine due to its inherent reactivity. This doesn't detract from the fact that water has quite different properties than what is known about these two elements. Back^
David J. Hill is a freelance writer in science education and a copyeditor in medical education. His interests include cultural and Christian perspectives on science and technology. In his spare time, he can be found obsessing about why the Book of Job is not talked about more on Sunday mornings and whether or not he should start a book on the lives of 18th-century scientists entitled, Alchemy Rules!: When Turning Stuff into Gold Was the Topic at the Water Cooler. He attended graduate school in chemistry at the University of Illinois and did his undergraduate work at Point Loma Nazarene University. He and his wife, Angel, have three children.
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