The New Order

What if the great discoveries of science came in the “wrong” order? The Laws of Thermodynamics were discovered well after the creation of algebra, classical physics, and chemistry, but are perhaps much more important to our basic understanding of the universe. This flawed chronology led to a confusion that has prevented a cross-curricular understanding of the sciences. With the development of Artificial Intelligence, it will soon be possible to solve the philosophical and biological problem of solipsism, the problem that all of our scientific discoveries have been necessarily – and incorrectly – built upon anachronistic foundations. In other words, we’ve built our fundamental understanding of science out of order.

In The New Order: How Artificial Intelligence Restructures Scientific Breakthroughs, author Chris Edwards shows that AI will be able to understand science without needing human analogies, will not be constrained by problems that are inherent in the traditional chronological developments of the sciences. If human scholars are to understand how AI interprets the universe, we will need to understand the scientific narrative in a “new order.”

Offering the historical narrative of science in the traditional order while explaining core ideas through the lens of thermodynamics, and then moving to the story of how a slew of quantum physicists connect thermodynamics retroactively to scientific history, Edwards provides a “new order” to place thermodynamics in its proper place at the center of our scientific universe. Under this “new order”, every other discovery is then connected through those concepts. AI is likely to view the history of the universe through entropy and probability, and with the insights and invention of The New Order, readers can, too.