The Rise of Effective Theories

Let us revisit an experiment from the previous chapter. Say you wanted to understand why people pushing buttons can sometime synchronize given enough connectivity in the system. If you remember, in that experiment every participant was given the instruction to adjust their pushing of buttons in whatever way they wanted in order to come into synchrony with the others. We could ask: “What does it mean to understand this phenomenon?” Would we be satisfied to refer to the generic Kuramoto model? Probably not entirely—some of the assumptions are unrealistic in this setting. In the Kuramoto model, the oscillators are continuously tugging on each other’s frequencies based on their respective phases. In our experiment here, people also adjusted their button pushing, but they could only do it in response to an LED flash on their terminal. OK, so what if we modified the model to reflect this pulse (as opposed to continuous) coupling between people’s responses? Would we be satisfied now, if the refined model showed mathematical hints of synchrony?