“Given the Letter’s timing and focus, this inquiry appears to be a component of a broader campaign against Justice Thomas and, now, Mr. Bopp, a lawyer for Crow, said in a letter to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden on Monday evening and obtained by CNN. “We have serious concerns about the scope of and authority for this inquiry,” Michael D. “Ultimately, we want to explain under which circumstances we will see novel properties,” says Larissa Albantakis, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.īut the study of emergence is, by turns, promising and maddeningly difficult.Harlan Crow, the GOP megadonor who paid for luxury travel for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, declined to answer questions raised by a key Democratic senator who is examining whether those trips and a private real estate deal could have triggered violations of US tax law. In both cases, simply understanding the basic constituents of the system doesn’t explain the phenomenon in question, never mind allow you to recreate it from scratch. Neuroscientists, meanwhile, find that consciousness seems to emerge from some collective behaviour of neurons. In physics, for example, some materials exhibit superconductivity, where large numbers of electrons can move without resistance, and yet it isn’t always clear why.

“There is a sense in which nothing in science makes sense without emergence,” says Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist and author based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Emergent phenomena are ubiquitous in nature and a proper grasp of how they come about could hold the key to solving some of our biggest mysteries. The wetness of water is an example of an “emergent” property: a phenomenon that can’t be explained by the fundamental properties of something’s constituent parts, but rather manifests only when those parts are extremely numerous. Put lots of them together in the right conditions, however, and you will get wet. There isn’t even anything wet about a single water molecule.

Rain is, after all, just molecules composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and there is nothing wet about hydrogen or oxygen on their own. THE next time you get caught in a downpour, don’t think about how wet you are getting – but how you are getting wet.

The turn of the key