Doing Physics, Second Edition: How Physicists Take Hold of the World

3. FREEDOM AND NECESSITY: FAMILY AND KINSHIP

70 Freedom and Necessity: Family and Kinship Recapitulation and Prospect; Kinship, Exchange, and Plenitude; Systematics in the Field; The Problem of “Quite Rarely”; Markets and Fetishes; Taking the Rules Seriously; Structure and System. The Argument Is: There is a remarkable analogy between kinship systems, particle physics, chemistry, and market economies. All may be accounted for by stories of fair exchange: of women, elementary particles, electrons, and currency and goods, respectively. Actual social systems and Nature are taken as the consequence of the necessary occurrence of all exchanges that are not forbidden (“plenitude”) and also the fact that names or labels on objects fully characterize them, both in theirinteractionwithotherobjectsandintheirclassificationintogroups of like objects (“fetishism” and “nondegeneracy”). Once we take on the worldasasystemofexchange,itseemswearealsocommittednotonlyto plenitude and nondegeneracy, but also to rules of exchange that balance or conserve the flows of exchanged objects, the set of exchanges being the glue which ties the system together–at least if we are physicists. Here, the degrees of freedom are those nondegenerate fetishized labels (particle properties, for example) interpreted by the rules of forbiddenness , rules which reflect the orderlinesses or symmetries of the system. And the conservation of flow (say in balancing goods and money, or charge, or energy that is exchanged) also implies that we treat the exchanged materials as fully commensurable with each other. The systemic structures that arise as a consequence of the processes ofexchange–suchasmarkets,conventionalsocieties,andthe“families” three Freedom and Necessity 71 of elementary particles–are not at all obvious were we told about just thoseprocesses.Thestructuresaresurprisesandaresaidtobeemergent. Whether it be in evolution or quantum mechanics, those surprises are, however, most often known already ahead of time; for the properties and rules are actually designed to give an account of those structures. “Who ordered that?”  –I. I. Rabi, referring to the muon particle.1 “Freedom is the recognition of necessity.”  – Spinoza2 Recapitulation and Prospect In the first chapter, our story concerned the division of labor within a factory. There we noted the intimate connection between the design of a factory and of the laborers who do the work within it, what has been called scientific management. Walls, particles, and fields work togethertomanufactureNature ,thedegreesoffreedomdistributedamong them. In the second chapter, a controlling metaphor was the clockworks mechanism,justthatmechanismthatMaxwellreveredinthepassagewe quoted in the preface. Nature was made up of individuals taken as parts, parts that fit together. And choosing the right parts leads to getting the degrees of freedom right, although those degrees of freedom might not belongtoanysinglepart.Inthischapter,weshallbeconcernedwithhow those individuals interact, how the processes of exchange and the extent of the market (to recall Adam Smith) produce Nature. Compared to the factory and the clockworks, the institution of the family seems primitive. We are sometimes told that taboo, incest, and kinship rules are atavisms. Yet, it turns out that within this story of mar­riage and fetishism* lies much of modern market economy, biology, *Fetishism isolates some thing from its larger context of interaction, treats it in terms of properties taken as belonging to it, and takes those properties and their associated powers or potencies as intrinsic to that thing’s nature. Hence, seemingly inanimate objects are taken to possess magical properties and powers (presumably reflecting their larger context); and parts of a more complex thing surrogate for the whole thing, as in the rhetorical trope of synecdoche. 72 Doing Physics chemistry, and particle physics. For families may be taken as kinship systems, as systems of relationship and exchange. Systems of that sort also model an economy or the interactions of elementary particles. The degreesoffreedomwithinsuchsystemsarethenamesthatdesignateour relationship to others, such as kinds of cousinhood or prices or chemical valence. I. I. Rabi was one of the great physicists of the twentieth century. Rabi’s comment was made upon the identification of the muon particle in 1947, a particle that was, as far as could be told, just like the electron except that it was about 207 times heavier. The muon did not seem to have a distinctive name (that is, a set of sufficiently distinctive properties other than its mass). It was a Doppelgänger: it was too much like the electron. In fact, it should have been “degenerate with” the electron, having the same mass.3 And as we shall see, from the physicist’s point of view there was no good reason for the muon to exist. It was not required that there be this heavy electron in the known system of...