Comments on: BBC Documentary – The Secret Life of Chaos

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:00:35 +0000

@farzad

Arvo Part – Spiegel Im Spiegel

By: Chris Redmond

Chris Redmond — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 21:34:41 +0000

“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)

By: Bern

Bern — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:37:17 +0000

“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?

By: farzad

farzad — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:04:22 +0000

anybody can tell me whose the music is playing in the documentary plz?

By: Tricia

Tricia — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:39:38 +0000

I wasn’t being serious, just flipant. I just meant life in general tends to be chaotic., well mine anyway.

By: G Walker

G Walker — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:35:00 +0000

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.

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:37:38 +0000

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?

By: OtherMike

OtherMike — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:16:14 +0000

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.

By: pete

pete — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:20:38 +0000

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.

By: Ali

Ali — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:26:22 +0000

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