The Secret Life of Chaos
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? It’s a mind-bending, counterintuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea.
But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics. Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern. And the best thing is that one doesn’t need to be a scientist to understand it.
The natural world is full of awe-inspiring examples of the way nature transforms simplicity into complexity. From trees to clouds to humans – after watching this film you’ll never be able to look at the world in the same way again. Find out more about the secret life of chaos.
Watch the full documentary now (playlist)
Pretty interesting stuff.
It is very interesting, indeed. How does this conflict with physical entropy laws? It seems that the two would be at odds. I will have to re-watch this for more clues.
Also, he states that from simplicity comes great complexity because of simple laws. However, each system seems to have its own set of ‘simple’ laws — some which conflict with each other. And each system needs its simple laws from the start.
I guess my point is this: If each system starts out with with a set of simple laws and moves to greater and greater complexity, and those systems evolved from earlier systems with their own simple laws, the causal chain must end with the most simple thing to possibly exist functioning by the most simple law there could possibly be with the end product being us. So, start with Hydrogen, add sufficient Time, and get humanity – all by itself.
Seriously, now. This sounds like magic. One of the problems here is that Professor Jim Al-Khalili – soothing voice notwithstanding – is in love with mathematics. Einstein is quoted as complaining that mathematicians were highjacking cosmology.
It seems to me that the problem with chaos and order resulting in complexity is in the bias linked with the notion of perception. Complexity implies a standard or limit of perception. The visual array perceived by the eye of a fly can be called ‘complex’ in relation to our human
sense of vision, but for a fly it is ordinary, therefore non-complex. Maybe what seems to us to be very complex models are very simple from different perspectives or even different power of computation. Even the term ‘chaos’ is relative, and can become irrelevant under the examination of that perception bias.
non of the above so called white scientist were the first!!!!!!
YIN YANG was discovered long before.
now they call it chaos & order
Chaos and order, go hand in hand. You cannot have one or the other. Chaos brings order and sometimes order brings chaos. I think we are witnessing the mechanics of God, if that’s what we call it. This is a universal law.
That was a refreshing documentary on its own. Awesome.
If you ask me, chaos and order are the only real forces in the universe, and both are part of the same universal force. Gravity, electromagnetism, these are just manifestations of ordered chaos on different scales.
This URL below is from my channel on YouTube. This particular one is a playlist for a series of readings from a book which has many answers to the questions posed in this video.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=21D438B6A4C2848E
It would be best to understand that Consciousness is not a physical thing, and so science without the aid of understanding something in a dimension that is not physical, needs to address the subject in light of considering some of the things this playlist talks about. For they talk about the First Cell, and how that all is established in a Force called by many names, God, Primal Cause, Consciousness, many names, how that it was a great civilization that impressed into the Mind all the information needed to even recreate the entire planet were it to be destroyed. This is a very interesting book but many find it hard to believe.
Anyone interested in beginnings should not avoid the consideration of this Primal Force.
very interesting indeed.. but the key to all principles of self organizing systems is that they first have to be set in motion. chaos can very well explain all the beautiful and seemingly random patterns in the universe, but there is still the big question of how it all began. perhaps string theory will one day answer that….
excited to see it my friend Dan is a fan of this website and it came highly recommended
That was one of the most interesting docs i’ve seen in a while, just amazing.
The next day I just kept noticing patterns in nature and life that was right in front of my face all along. amazing.
“Female cage fighters” mentioned at the very end of this vid… Shouldn’t that video also be included as part of this show on Chaos? I know I want to see it…
Seems evident to me that the universe is itself a Mandelbrot Set, with infinite bidirectional nested Baby-Brots– Those structures our scientits currently recognize as: Groups of galaxy clusters / individual galaxies/ solar systems / planetary-moon groups / groups of living organism-communities / an individual animal / groups of differentiated cells / collaborative molecules / atoms / sub-atomics / p-branes / back down-up to another whole set of next-order galaxies, of the kind I’ve mentioned in a previous post on my Mr. Bubble Theory of The Universe.
Do not condemn people just because they seem different than you.
The world requires them too.
RIP Alan Turing.
I’ve a passion for science documentaries;but the secret life of chaos is Khalili’s most outstanding to date.
Very well done Jim; let’s have more;you’ve clearly got a talent for broadcasting in simple terms that which we mortals can understand and goggle at.
Fascinating, up to the point where this contemporary thinking is claimed to rescue Darwinian evolution. No, that is staggering on to death, altho the Neo-Darwinian old guard will doubtless seize on this as a last-gasp. Perry Marshall has demonstrated from information theory that random DNA mutations cannot enhance, only degrade. At most, these developments are mathematical descriptions of the dance of chaos & order. They do not ‘explain’ it. Eg., the computer modeling exercises are impressive, but depend on the primary input of human intelligence. The acid test of a scientific theory is its predictive power. There seems to be a paradox here. Insofar as there is understanding of chaos, those claiming it must have some power to predict where evolution is leading. Instead, we are told this is impossible, becos the process is chaotic. Hmmmmm! OGT
Sounds interesting.
I wonder what it would be like without Chaos. To me it makes sense to have chaos. (Paradox)???????
Chaos is the Great Equalizer.
Good doc.
Without appearing redundant, as I have had discourse about similar on many posts.
We are talking about series of events, albeit from the very small, “Quantum” from which everything generates.
These are courses of probable actions from the sea of unlimited probabilities.
“The butterfly effect”, one probable action no matter how minute will cause a direction of ongoing change that will become a concrete of reality. The unresolved other courses of probable actions however are just as valid and real, to our other multidimensional selves, other probable reality’s. Which are limitless. But not in the scope of our vibrational “now’s”.
This falls into the realm of unpredictability, and of course comes from the realm of Quantum mechanics, the unpredictability of Quantum.
And all I can say is that from this new science should come some answers. Of which none fundamentally concrete as yet.
Because, alas, just like the Mandelbrot sets, they are mathematical constructs.
@Chris:
Can you be more specific about which “physical entropy laws” you have in mind?
The “simplicity yielding complexity” in chaotic systems comes from non-linearity (i.e. feedback). You don’t get exploding complexity from linear systems because small differences in the inputs stay small all the way through; non-linear systems can magnify small differences through feedback. You can model this behavior quite easily using the iterative form of the logistic equation:
http://www.stsci.edu/~lbradley/seminar/logdiffeqn.html
The logistic equation is very simple but it can, for some parameters, exhibit very complex behavior.
Sufficient time isn’t quite enough, you also have to consider the number of hydrogen atoms involved. Do not expect intuition to function here as the time frames and numbers are way outside of what our brains have evolved to handle. Untrained intuition works great for normal circumstances — low speeds, low numbers, time frames from one second to a year, masses from one gram to 1000kg, distances from 1mm to 1km — but intuition needs to be retrained to work outside these common ranges.
Introductory statistics show problems with our grasp of large numbers; Relativity shows our problems with high speeds, high masses, and large distances; Quantum Mechanics shows our problems with small masses, small time frames, and small distances.
Jim Al-Khalili is probably in love with mathematics because it actually works and produces real results. Einstein also said that:
“I am convinced that purely mathematical construction enables us to find those concepts and those lawlike connections between them that provide the key to the understanding of natural phenomena.”
As usual, finding a quote to support any particular position is rather easy, especially with wikiquote and google in hand.
Chaos and randomness are completely different things. Chaotic systems are completely 100% deterministic: if you feed a chaotic system the same inputs two different times, you will get identical results. However, real measurements always come with error bars; you never have have a value of 3cm in the physical world, you always have “3cm ± e” for some error “e”. This error is where the problems arise and the error cannot be reduced to zero.
A random sequence is, essentially, a sequence that can only be described by writing out the entire sequence, every bit of information in a random sequence is required to describe the sequence. Another way of looking it is that a random sequence cannot be compressed into a shorter form without losing information; compression schemes such as zip files, GIF images (but not JPEG, that’s lossy), and MPG work by finding patterns/redundancies in the data and removing them in various ways.
If anyone is interested, James Gleick’s ‘Chaos-Making a new science’ Penguin books. Covers the history, beginning with Edward Lorenz.
Eloquently put Eric.
Indeed (to echo Max),
I’ll be looking for more of your posts Mr. Howe.
This is another awesome documentary. Professor Jim Al-Khalili is awesome as well. He’s so easy to understand even though the subject matter is pretty complex. Thank you again for having this here. =)
This is one of the most profound documentaries I have ever seen. On the level of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.
I would love for everyone to see and discuss this information.
isn’t this dialectic materialism?
Cute documentary i’ll send it to a few darwinists to help them sleep better at night =p
i think is simply the best science documentary i have seen to date and i have seen quite a lot of them since discovering this site. it just goes to show that clear and well presented ideas are better than the sensationalised mostly deep voice i have heard in most science documentaries
beautiful |