11 — Chaos/James Gleick
“People say, what use is disorder. But people have to know about disorder if they are going to deal with it.
A truer statement could not be made about my early twenties. My life, more often than not and in particular right now, seems to be aperiodic and governed only by chaos.
“Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world…Our feeling for beauty is inspired by the harmonious arrangement of order and disorder as it occurs in natural objects.”
I’m not quite sure why, but this book (and most discussion of first principles in physics) makes me think of design, particularly the design of good narratives, be they written, spoken, or communicated in by some other medium.
“In biology, chaos is death.”
“Is it possible that mathematical pathology, i.e. chaos, is health? And that mathematical health, which is the predictability and differentiability of this kind of a structure, is disease?”
Together, these two quotes represent a divine paradox to science but one that is familiar to any designer, “chaos is death, and predictability, disease.” In terms of design, true randomness is incomprehensible, unattractive, and terrifying, yet overt predictability is boring, a slower, more painful kind of death.
Paradoxes are certainly a theme in this book as well as in chaos theory generally. Nonlinear systems are often understood graphically/topographically/geometrically as fractals, beautifully complex designs that repeat ad infinitum as a result of scale. For me, a good example to consider is the similarity between the orbit of electrons around the nucleus and the orbit of planets around a star. What if every electron is a planet that holds sub-microscopic humans, and those humans are also made of sub-sub-microscopic particles which contain electrons which contain humans, and so on and so forth. Despite the perceived size or shape of an object, scale matters. And these fractals allow for mathematical paradoxes, like this one, an infinite line contained within a finite space.
With all this talk of dynamic systems, I also can’t help thinking about great groups and the need for more collaboration, not just in the study of nonlinear systems, but in all of science. I can’t help wondering how much world-changing science has been left undiscovered on the lab benches between disciplines.
Lingering question: What if consciousness is not a characteristic of life in particular, but one simply of form in motion? This idea of motion plus form in chaos theory is called flow (yeah, like that mental state when you do something you love and time disappears). Maybe there’s some underlying connection here, maybe mental flow is actually really about the motion of our brains and not the form?
“Of course the entire effort is to put oneself/outside the ordinary range/of what we call statistics.”
12 — Elizabeth Costello/J.M. Coetzee
