Physics Lournal

"History generally, and the history of revolutions in particular, is always richer in content, more varied, more many-sided, more lively and subtle than even the best historian and the best methodologist can imagine" - Lenin.

Some implications of this are that when we think about, speak about, or write about History, we are inevitably simplifying it, because the complexity of the reality of any historic event, is larger than we can ever communicate.

A true, albeit hyperbolically true, history, would have to keep track of the activities of every particle in the universe. If we attempt to scale this down we find that we can't do it satisfactorily even at seemingly "small" scales, such as cities, when compared to the hyperbole, perhaps even neighborhoods, and households, down to a person in fact: we are forced to omit detail.

They say History is written by the winners, and the victors, but this perspective rules out that binary perspective, with History being many-sided- of course one can pick a side as a "Winner", lumping the other sides in the losers group, but this is of course, another one of the simplifications we must do.

"[History is full of] accidents and conjunctures and curious juxtapositions of events...[and demonstrates the] complexity of human change, and the unpredictable character of the ultimate consequences of any given act or decision of men." - Herbert Butterfield

There's a very leap-of-faith feeling to taking this perspective on history, as we like to think of it as an accurate road-map to modern times, but the idea of it being filled with plot-holes, and loose-ends, is very unsettling, as it means we don't have the manual for human success that we felt we did. And of course, this adds more mystery, as there can only be wondering done about the influences on the trajectory of history that were lost to it. Not only do we not know what happened, we never will.

These rapid changes are phase-transitions., and we generally can only understand them in hindsight, which betrays their unexpected and sudden, almost Black Swan like nature.

Really, History is an example of complexity. The "unpredictable character of the ultimate consequences of decisions", has a striking similarity to non-linearity, and chaos in complex systems:

Unpredictable behavior, and real-world events that can affect production environments, can make distributed systems chaotic.

This is from Chaos Engineering, which is very interesting.

History displays so many characteristics of complexity/complex systems: Dense or high connectivity of components, as this increases, these take precedence over the properties of components.

Referenced in

Atom and Void (Essays on Science & Community)

Also, no analysis of such things is likely to be "final and exhaustive", because science is foremost an ongoing process, which means it is unfolding in the very moment that one seeks to explain it. And of course, because this process is one of the "tangled affairs of men", one can consider the following excerpts from Against Method: LbrNtFiTb -TZ_kfJmr, as perhaps Oppenheimer rightfully understood just how recursive and continuous the process of science was, being at the forefront of one of, if not the most generative era, and that truly explaining what all took place, would not be feasible.

**Introduction-AM**