ABSTRACT
Coordination as instanced by the isochrony of a pair of limbs is brought within the province of the physics of cooperativity. A virtual single wrist-pendulum system is identified as the cooperative level of a minimal ensemble of two entities. The support for this cooperative level comes from the dynamical relation between (a) the two component wrist-pendulum systems and (b) the experimentally required relations between them. The former are viewed as atomisms operating from "below" and the latter are viewed as field boundary conditions or nonholonomic constraints operating from "above." Three aspects of this cooperative level construal of a virtual system are emphasized: It is a unitary process, signified by single quantities of mass and length (see Chapter 6 ), that is assembled in significant part by the conservations; it behaves like a rigidly connected, conservative field—a local perturbation is responded to by the cooperativity as a whole; and it determines, by its particular steady-state demands, the degrees of local deviations from steady state and, therefore, the interactive forces manifest at the atomistic level. The main line of empirical support for the latter point identifies a candidate dimensionless number that expresses the mismatch between the equilibrium states of the cooperative and atomistic levels. It is proposed that the magnitude of this number indexes the magnitude of restorative forces required to 252 maintain the virtual single system qua cooperativity. The larger coefficients of curvature in the [log To x log (M1/16L1/2)] plots of the virtual single systems reported in Chapter 8 are attributed to this additional potential, namely, the energy required to coordinate the two limbs. The energy for coordination for each virtual system is determined by the classical mechanics procedure for assessing the internal energy of a system of particles. So determined, the magnitude of the proportion of total mechanical energy devoted to coordination is found to correlate positively with the magnitude of the proposed dimensionless number.
