Tag: Chemistry

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On the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and teaching design

In the first year of my undergraduate chemistry course, we learnt about a concept called the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This term refers to a phenomenon predicted by classical physics that people could see just didn’t make sense in reality. This was a major problem for physicists because it showed that their theories didn’t stack up. The punchline was that Max Planck came along and explained the phenomenon in a new way, which became the birth of quantum mechanics. 

I remember finding the original Ultraviolet Catastrophe concept difficult to comprehend (although I did think it would make a good band name). And now I realise the only reason we learnt about the theory was to show that it was wrong. In a sense, we were being taught chemistry in the order that the discoveries had been made — in the order that predecessors had learnt.

But does that always make sense? This approach is founded in a ‘positivist’ learning framing. It says, this is how the world showed up to me and I will now pass that story on to you (and then test you on it!). I named our company Constructivist after the more modern learning theory that says that people learn by taking new concepts and mapping them to their previous experiences. Learning is to do with how the world shows up to the learner, not the lecturer. 

And so this leaves design educators with a challenge. In a sense, the ‘Ultraviolet Catastrophe’ moment of classical design thinking is that, as currently formulated, design thinking is not sufficient to make the world better. I see regenerative design as an evolution in design thinking. One that integrates more fully our responsibility for increasing living-system health. And as we are discovering, it has some very different approaches compared to traditional design. 

For the ‘classical’ designers, developing an understanding of regenerative design will indeed be an evolution. But for people new to design thinking, they aren’t burdened with that history. Instead, they have grown up with the climate and ecological crises that previous design and engineering thinking has helped to create. This is not an imagined ultraviolet catastrophe, but a real, unfolding catastrophe. We need to be teaching design for their story, not ours.

[My thanks to Nick Francis at the University of Sheffield for our recent conversation that fed into this post]

[This post was originally published on Eiffelover.com and now has a new home here].

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Overcoming the status quo

A system rests at equilibrium because that is its most likely position. Any spare energy is used up by processes — feedback loops — that keep returning the part of the system to this state.

This applies in organisations as much as in chemical systems.

We may make what feels like a significant change. A new initiative. A new process. A new product. But if the original feedback loops aren’t altered, then over time, friction will rub away what is distinct and we return to the status quo.

If we want to create a new equilibrium — a new status quo — then we need to:

  1. rewire the feeeback loops to reinforce this change rather than continuously undermine it
  2. Imbue the new initiative with enough energy to resist the friction it causes while the system around it rearranges itself.

If the change is good enough, it will generate enough energy of its own to keep going. That’s how most solutions succeed, be they organisational, or chemical.

Related tool > Ambition Loops

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Boltzmann laughter distribution

This week I’ve been playing around with a way to explain the Boltzmann distribution — a mathematical function that predicts how energy is likely to spread out in a volume of gas. 

Imagine you have an audience of 100 people. Imagine there is a fixed amount of laughter to go around. What’s the most likely way the laughter will be distributed in the audience. 

Now, already I can see this analogy breaking down. But let’s just go with it for a little longer. 

We could arrange things so that one person does all the laughing. As there’s 100 people in the room, there’s 100 different ways we could do this: one for each possible solo laugher. 

Now imagine  we have two people laughing each with half the total available laughter. There are now 4,950 ways to pick those two people — in other words 4,950 ways to pick two people from 100.

The more we spread the laughter around, the more ways there are of distributing that laughter. 

The equation is for an audience size of n, and the number of people laughing in the audience, the number of ways of arranging laughter is n!/(k!(n-k)!).

This number of combinations gets very large very quickly. For half the audience laughing, there are approximately 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ways of doing this.

This idea — the some arrangements have more ways of being achieved than others — is what underlies the Boltzmann distribution. 

Introducing some more formal language:

A macrostate is the overall situation (eg half the room laughing)

A microstate is one specific way of achieving that macrostate (eg exactly which 50 out of the 100 are laughing). 

Now, energy in a system doesn’t decide which microstate to be in. It just jostles around between different microstates. Some energy here, some energy there. But since there are far far more ways of achieving the more distributed macro states than the ones where energy is concentrated, the system almost always ends up in a highly distributed macro state. 

The macrostate with the most microstates is overwhelmingly likely.

This is why energy spreads out in a room. It isn’t a plan, it is just the macrostate that is overwhelmingly more likely. Like billions and billions of times more likely. 

This concept underpins ideas like equilibrium, itself an important underpinning idea in regenerative design. The goal of regenerative design is for humans and the living world to survive, thrive and co-evolve — in other words, thriving in equilibrium.

Of course, any physicists listening to this would laugh me off stage. For one thing, laughter isn’t a fixed quantity. And for another, one person’s laughter can trigger more. And…one person laughing amongst 100 is in itself funny. 

Now if there were 100 physicists in the room…how many would be laughing?