Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand.
It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia – how did we get here?
In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science – how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder?
How does order emerge from disorder?
Fuck knows
I find the opposite more likely.
Love these posts, ta Phillis. You look after us. Oh, I’ve just realised that’s the thing my pal Ian’s been editing! Exciting!
I watched that, it was fascinating xx
Great documentary
Doesn’t spend most of its time recapping the previous points like Discovery channel (and recently Horizon) have been doing but fills it with science delivered in an entertaining way, like it used to be before producers decided their audience all suffered from ADD and started producing repetative crap.
who sez order has emerged? heh heh heh…we are everywhere…
Very interesting……
LC x
Great documentary, there is always structure in chaos and chaos in structure as one creates the other. but it was interesting to see a subtle force underneath the chaos effecting things like the chemicals in the dish. Some might call that the tao etc.
Just to say, this is on iPlayer too, for those who want the full uninterrupted version! http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00pv1c3/The_Secret_Life_of_Chaos/
So, I think we can all conclude that math is God!
That was a fantastically intriguing documentary.
I’m ever so spooked by the repeated pattern concept presented. As a very young kid i always visualized these patterns in my head when i saw a particular shape that could sustain it. I always attempted to imagine how deep and how far these patterns would go.
Now i’m not one for little green men or E.T’s but i couldn’t help thinking while watching this that if all this holds true, somewhere out there in the vastness of space there has to be life, chaotic as the universe may be it’s trying to get into some order through self organisation, of which we are a result, i’m not saying there’s people out there, just something.
ordo ab chao – order out of chaos
Dull documentary. Only outlined concepts in the most abstract possible way, never delving beyond banal high level statements like “Turing discovered MATHS was responsible for what he was seeing!” or endlessly repeating the presenter’s amazement as a solution oscillated between clear and yellow without giving any real explanation for what was happening.
This is a fascinating subject but I don’t feel the programme gave it’s audience credit for taking an interest in the topic beyond a lovely, flowery, emotive view of modern science.
I loved that programme, I myself wrote a computer program to generate a mandelbrot set (mentioned in the programme). It is amazing how a beautiful complex picture can be generated with such elegant equations.
http://fav.me/d2hhslc
I thought this was stimulating and exciting.Unfortunately I have to agree with the gist of Jim’s comments.When we were shown the computer generated figures and told that they had evolved from “brains” this wasn’t explained at all.Were they really just talking about trial and error in their computer progams where they just opted for the ones that approached the most natural looking motion.
I thought the presenter was really an interesting teacher but there were gaping holes in the explanations.
Can anybody make things clearer.
Incidentally even without a computer you have have a lot of fun with recursive patterns. For instance, draw a lone, draw a couple of other lines that branch off or bisect that, and then repeat the exact same thing for the resulting lines and part of lines, until it’ too small to draw any more. Tweak the lengths and positions of different lines, experiement with growing lines outwards versus filling in existing lines and so on, and you end up with a range of shapes and patterns that are all non-obvious expressions of the random patterns you first thought of.
I wish I could find a simple computer program to do the same thing though. And I’d like to have seen a better explanation of his video experiment.
Life is an innate property of matter, a beautiful potential in the mists of phase space, a wonderful self-organisation of complex systems, universal and eternal in potentia…I have been saying this since I was about seven. It seems so obvious to me, and now it is science. How fabuloso.
Panspermia anyone?
Tricia – You asked “How does order emerge from disorder?” You need to take up science, and start studying things such as crystals and snowflakes. Beautiful complex structures can and do arise automatically in nature without any intelligence or desiger. There are countless examples of order and complexity emerging out of disorder, in science, and no desiger is needed to explain why.
I wasn’t being serious, just flipant. I just meant life in general tends to be chaotic., well mine anyway.
anybody can tell me whose the music is playing in the documentary plz?
“It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia – how did we get here?”
Except this is not the question that mankind has asked for millennia, at least not if by “how” you mean “by what processes”. The key question mankind has asked for millennia is not HOW did we develop but WHY are we here? For what ultimate reason are we here? WHY these processes in the first place? WHY anything at all? Whence existence?
“Beautiful complex structures can and do arise automatically in nature without any intelligence or desiger.”
How do you know?
We have certain laws of physics which account for these structures – can you explain why these laws exist when there is no reason they should?
I’m not going to suggest there must have been some intelligent designer, or indeed any intelligence, as I have no way of backing this up whatsoever and couldn’t make a convincing argument.
On the other hand, if you can successfully argue that you understand why we have the laws of physics, which might not apply to other universes for all we know, then I’m all ears. :0)
@farzad
Arvo Part – Spiegel Im Spiegel