Not Shocked

There's an interesting article over at physorg that talks about the "crowd behavior" of excitons in gallium arsenide thin film semiconductors. It seems to be a measurement that confirms theoretical predictions about the higher-order self-interactions of these little not-particles (i love it that you can take {a thing}+{the absence of a thing} and describe the pair like its a new particle).

this leads me to two of my many mantras --

* Nature has no problem adding shit up. we are constantly "discovering" higher order interactions and levels of detail that have huge effects when the harmonics of the situation are tuned just right, but i don't recall anyone drawing particular attention to the tremendous amount of information that's *thrown away* by making the kind of first-principle approximations that science routinely makes in order to get close to the mark with a doable amount of effort. every time that happens, there's a whole branch of inquiry opened up for figuring out what information you threw away in the approximation, and discovering it as new content. it's difficult for us to determine the 17th order interactions of electrons and their absent counterparts, but in practice i guarantee that the world has no issue including the 128th order of self interaction in every moment's equation.

* (I believe) The behavior patterns associated with conscious, intelligent people are bound to be found at the quantum or very small classical level -
i'm on a limb, no logical justification for this yet, but i'm never shocked to hear that some subatomic system is behaving in a way similar to the way humans behave, or that some socialogy term has found its way into a physics journal.