Having already discussed unintended consequences earlier, a good question to ask if some of these unfolding, unknown scenarios are predictable or quantfiable before the fact. ? Yes, potentially in a rough outline, they are.

Recently I discussed PNM with a particle physicist, an extremely able and creative guy who has published over 70 papers and worked on the project team at Fermilab that found evidence of the Top Quark. His response to Dr. Barnett’s System Perturbations analysis was follows:

“…it sounds like the driving principle of chaos theory. For a given set of initial conditions, one gets some result/final state. If there is some very minor fluctuation or perturbation on the exact same system that causes even minute changes in the initial conditions, a chaotic system will evolve very differently than under the original set of initial conditions, resulting in a drastically different result/final state. Chaotic systems can be complex and are unpredictable. Without knowing any details of Barnett’s work, my guess is he is trying to apply such ideas to social situations, and in my mind anything that includes humans is by definition a complex and/or chaotic system. The best one likely can do is apply probability theory to the system. We have an advantage in the physical sciences of having mathematical models in place that can be confirmed via controlled experiment, and then do computer simulations to predict outcomes on complex and chaotic systems. But some are so complex, such as weather systems, that many assumptions have to be made.

Keep in mind, too, that complexity theory fundamentally looks at how single elements spontaneously organize into complicated structures. How do individual species organize into ecosystems? How do individual stocks relate and become part of the structure of an economy? How do individuals organize into societies or civilizations? People suspect that there are similar mathematical rules for very diverse examples such as these. A perturbation theory for such mathematical models would look to account for ‘noise’ one gets in the system.”

Presumably, the pure math and computer analysts could develop sets of simple models and run scenarios based on the premises of historical data ( 9/11, the Stock Market Crash of 1929, major earthquakes, pandemics etc.) . This is so far out of my field of expertise that I’m not capable of giving a reasonable estimate but the work on hypothetical nuclear warfare exchanges during the Cold War and global warming models should have left a body of experts capable of at least starting work on PNM System Perturbations.

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