Equinox : Anti Chaos

a thousand years ago this valley was the home of the Anasazi Indians the Anasazi were fabulously wealthy they imported food they developed advanced technologies they constructed these sophisticated and technologically complex four-story high buildings the Anasazi had it all yet only a few hundred years after reaching the peak of their success the society completely collapsed leaving behind a ghost city and the unanswerable question what went wrong this is a story that has been repeated since the birth of civilization Egypt Rome and more recently the Soviet Union not just human societies follow this pattern of emerging from chaos prospering and becoming stable then suddenly disintegrative whole species such as the dinosaurs followed the same packing and seemingly the pattern is repeated everywhere planets and stars have formed from a mess of chaotic lee moving atoms order and stability seem to be imposed until finally and usually catastrophically chaos reigns once again it's been the ambition of scientists for the last 5000 years to try and understand this sort of basic pattern which underlies nature and human life they've been successful in explaining predicting and even controlling relatively simple phenomena that they cannot predict the weather or the next earthquake or the next extinction which might be ours recently scientists came up with a theory of chaos it explains how unpredictable outcomes arise from seemingly simple rules now some researchers claimed to have found a revolutionary new theory it explains how order arises from chaos and they call this new science anti chaos and it could overturn most of present scientific thinking fish swimming around in a haphazard fashion can in an instant change to a school which behaves as one entity when hundreds of birds rise into the air they do so as individuals flapping their wings out of rhythm with the bird next to them yet rapidly this random motion of bodies and wings coalesce into a graceful formation a flock of birds can swoop and wheel about as if directed by a single mind high-speed film reveals that the turning motion traveled through the flock as a wave in about 170 of a second far less than a bird's reaction time how do the messages turn left turn right pass through the group telepathy has been suggested but a supernatural explanation is unnecessary mathematicians have discovered that order can arise spontaneously from the interaction of many simple individuals each of these computer simulations called Boyd's follows its own simple rules of behavior yet surprisingly the group flocks as in real life a pattern has arisen from disorder patterns and structures are everywhere in nature and in society they appear in the arrangement of atoms to form crystals or the collective behavior of ants in the way species evolve and become extinct and even the rises and falls of financial markets but it's beyond the power of traditional science to explain or predict these phenomena when structure emerges from chaos that breaks one of the cornerstones of modern science the second law of thermodynamics there's considerable evidence to support the second law it explains how things such as plants decay with time from the highly ordered structure of a plant cells we pass two stages of increasing disorder or what's called increasing entropy the greater the disorder the more the original form disappears in the extreme this means that the order of the universe as we know it with steadily burning stars and organized lumps of matter called planets will eventually disintegrate when all the energy is dissipated everything will cease and all structure will vanish in the heat death of the universe that is according to the second law of thermodynamics yet this is not what we find somehow as the universe moves towards its inevitable end it continually creates interesting structures along the way scientists who rely on the second law find it impossible to explain the process those who study anti chaos and are formulating the new science of complexity hope to explain how order arises from chaos if there's any one big question that complexity is trying to address its why is there something rather than nothing in some ways that's the ultimate question in science physicists for well over a hundred years have been very good at understanding the universal tendency towards disorder and decay it's often called the second law of thermodynamics the increase in entropy we look around and we can see very clearly that things decay that iron rusts that fallen logs rot that temperature goes from hot to cold things cool off but at the same time not only to fallen logs rot but trees grow if we look around we see stars galaxies you know people plants animals there's enormous amounts of structure in the world it's almost as if there were a universal yearning towards order almost a forest towards order this could mean the second law of thermodynamics is wrong it could mean as some people claim that physicists have proved that life can't exist it could mean that since life does exist that something supernatural must be involved my feeling is it's the interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics that's wrong and that life is actually consistent with the second law but that the kind of things it's doing are just not the sort of things the second law addresses another fundamental law is Isaac Newton's law of gravity discovered in 1684 but first scientists thought it would reveal many secrets of the universe it accurately predicted the motions of all heavenly bodies and was followed only three years later by his famous laws of motion it was thought then that using these tools it would only be a matter of time before the whole universe could be explained these ideals have driven scientists to try and find simple laws underlying even the most complicated phenomena such laws became the basis of all scientific method and they have been very productive biologists dug deep into cells at a molecular level and found the double helix the code of life itself physicists smashed atoms apart to discover the particles produced by the Big Bang the building blocks of the entire universe but in the process they discovered something strange their laws weren't good enough Newtonian laws can explain what we call linear systems for a given cause there is always a predictable outcome that is not true however for complex systems the behavior for instance of water molecules which when gathered in huge numbers and subjected to heat and pressure create a very unpredictable system we call it the weather this type of behavior has been dubbed emergent you have an emergent phenomenon when the components out of which a system is made have one kind of behavior but the system as a whole shows a different kind of behavior so that you cannot reduce the behavior of the whole system to the behavior of the individual components in other words you have a kind of irreducibility and emergence refers to that kind of irreducible order that comes out of a complex system look at an individual water molecule its behavior in liquid water gives us few clues as to how the same molecule will behave when heated to form vapor or when it's cooled to form ice crystals the idea of emergence of course has been around for a long time we've known about it since we've known about hurricanes I guess perhaps before that what is new in the science of complexity what caused it to come out in the last ten years or so is several things one is that starting in the 1970s scientists had much more access to powerful computers and could begin to model complicated systems and see what kinds of behaviors they engaged in often not at all obvious from the equations that they fed into the computers another thing that happened was the spectacular success of molecular biology where biologists went in dissected out and looked at the individual molecules that were the basis of life and began to appreciate that the essence of life was the organization of those mom Jools how they interacted with each other in with each other in a very dynamic collective way and then of course the understanding of the mathematics of nonlinear equations and chaos had a profound impact also chaos is the name given to systems which appear to behave randomly yet can be analyzed mathematically the intricately beautiful shape of a fractal is the image of chaos at work its complex structure repeating itself on infinitely diminishing scales is created on the computer from the simplest of rules the discovery that complex behavior can come from simple rules is at the heart of chaos the kind of thing where you can see chaos in action is a food mixer in the kitchen the actual rules of a food mix are very simple you put the food in you push the button and little paddle wheels go round and round around in circles and you say well there's nothing very complicated about a food mixer but actually there is if somebody says there is a particular grain of sugar in that food mixer I'm gonna press the button for 30 seconds and I want you to tell me where that grain is going to end up it's very hard to answer that question and this is the kind of prediction that science would expect to make chaotic systems are everywhere from the fracturing of water drops falling to the ground to the behavior of larger bodies of water in the turbulent motion of a stream but chaos is not randomness it has form understanding chaos is to begin to understand the underlying nature of complex systems chaos is one piece of the theory of complexity in a sense probably it's the first piece people really understood fairly well and it's because in fact it comes from simple causes if the causes are simple you can put them on a computer you can follow through what happens and you can see even if the results look complicated you know where they came from it's the other way around that's much more difficult if the causes are very complicated then you can't even get started while chaotic systems create ever-increasing complexity and unpredictability others behave in exactly the opposite way some quite disordered systems spontaneously crystallize into a high degree of order this is the influence of anti chaos the Bellis of zhabotinsky experiment shows how order spontaneously arises in a chemical process for chemicals are mixed together gradually concentric waves of red and blue separate out in complete contrast with the expected random mixing of molecules such a degree of order stemming from the activity of billions of molecules seems incredible but the process is not only observed in the laboratory a similar pattern occurs in the reproductive process the one simple organism when individual cells swarm together almost as if acting under orders to form a combined entity called slime mold striking patterns appear in the arrangement of molecules on a platinum catalyst that the patterns can be found in so many different systems implies that at the most fundamental level universal principles of organization are at work from computer simulations of forest fires to the behavior of ants for some time it has occurred to a lot of scientists that ant colonies and the social insects generally have fascinating dynamic patterns of behavior there are somewhat reminiscent of the way mines behave in other words you have all these simple elements the ants running about doing their own thing and out of that comes a particular kind of order it's like neurons interacting doing very simple things in the brain but if you put enough them together and have them interact in a particular way you get the most extraordinary type of behavior coming up the behavior of individual ants is much more random than that of the colony as a whole the community follows a regular pattern of activity and inactivity it appears to have a periodic rhythm of about 28 minutes but why do all the ants stop and start at the same time nothing tells them to Brian Goodwin turned to a computer model to try and find out we tried to produce the simplest possible model that could account for this type of behavior and so we developed a model in which ants were represented as very simple automata so they were just interacting they could move and what emerged very quickly from this model was the fact that periodicity is at the level of the colony suddenly appeared the model also showed that without the simple form of interaction between ants no order emerged the computer ants are not programmed to act as a unified group yet if they're allowed to wander it will bump into one another and react the temporal pattern of activity returns at first sight the idea of order emerging from randomness is inherently unlikely imagine a system of 26 elements the letters of the alphabet someone blindfolded and with no knowledge of the keyboard taps the keys of a typewriter at random what are the chances of a whole word of hearing from the resulting letters and what are the chances of the letters organizing themselves into say a Shakespeare play Hamlet for example then if you ran the experiment again what are the chances of the same play materializing again and again in nature this kind of organization can and does occur does the theory of anti chaos tell us why I became interested in anti chaos on an intuitive basis I wanted to understand the order of development the way a fertilized egg develops into an adult organism which is a most amazing process that nobody understands yet you have to understand that one begins with a fertilized egg the zygote and it then goes through 50 or so cell divisions and during the course of that cells become different from one another this is a process called cell differentiation so that the beginning fertilized egg the zygote winds up making about 200 and different 250 different cell types muscle cells nerve cells spleen cells kidney cells and so on and it's quite clear that all of the cells in your body have the same set of genes about a hundred and a hundred thousand or so in us different cells differ because different genes are active in them being active means making an RNA molecule and making a protein so liver cells make one set of proteins and kidney cells another and one knew even then that genes turned one another on and off in some complex orchestrated dance anti chaos from the outset was my intuition and hope namely that one would find that the order that you see in development in cell differentiation is spontaneous and natural and rather inevitable rather than being merely the improbable consequences of mutation and selection if we want to think of the genome as a hundred thousand genes in some kind of network turning one another on and off then there's no mathematical tools readily available to look at a system of that complexity we're going to have to invent some new ones the ones that I invented some time ago were based on thinking of a gene is just active or inactive as if it were a light bulb and its product molecule just present or absent so also like a light bulb to get an array of light bulbs to behave in a way reminiscent of that which controls our genes they have to be wired up following simple rules the resulting network is called a boolean network in the most complex version of a boolean each light bulb is wired to every other one via a switch which obeys a rule the rule might be an individual bulb will light only if two others are lit incredibly with even a smaller number of light bulbs as 200 the time it would take to cycle through every possible state of the network is billions of times longer than the age of the universe so arriving at any given pattern of lighting would be extremely unlikely here bulbs colored green are lighting up randomly but the few islands of red show where some stability has been achieved but a boolean network model of the human genome not 200 elements but a hundred thousand if it followed these rules life would probably never have happened by making a simple change in the way elements are connected when each light bulb is only wired to two others things get considerably better order and stability emerge the most stunning results happen if you build a network in which every light bulb has inputs from two other lightbulbs even if you assign those connections at random even if you assign the rule governing every light bulb at random such a mad scramble of wiring and logic nevertheless exhibits anti chaos this is order for free even if the network has a hundred thousand light bulbs and then the total possible number of states of the system turns out to be a mere three hundred and twenty or so roughly the number of cell types in the human body simplifying the connections produces just a tiny number of states of the network or the genome and to give you a sense of how tiny it is we have to counter the number of possible states that your genome could be in if each gene could be active or inactive and there's a hundred thousand genes the number of possible alternative patterns of any genome in your body any one of your cells is one followed by thirty thousand zeros it's an enormous hyper astronomical unthinkable number anti chaos says that a system of that kind despite that vast complexity boxes its behavior into a tiny tiny tiny region of its space of possibilities and cycle through them that's the order that's pointed to and one says anti chaos in the same way that a network of lightbulbs can represent certain aspects of the behavior of the human genome more dynamic complex systems can be modeled and studied by watching piles of sand form the sand pile model is a model of a last dynamical system which consists of many parts suppose you built the sand pile but robbing grains of sand one at the time on your desk in the beginning the pile will be flat and it will be near equilibrium all the sand grains of sand will be lying very low and they won't see each other they won't interact with each other as you keep adding particles so the system the heap will become steeper and steeper and you will start getting small avalanches in the system that means that the individual parts of the system start interacting with each other and eventually the avalanches will become bigger and bigger and bigger until you reach reach a critical slope where the system will not grow any further and at that stage you have avalanches of all sizes that means that the system interacts globally what happens at one part of the heap will event can eventually affect what happens at any other part of the heap we don't have separate grains of sand anymore we don't have many many distinct systems we have only one pile of sand the form one big dynamical system such systems are all around us the extremes of the weather the extinction of species wild fluctuations of currency markets and many other phenomena think of earthquake that's being generated by pushing tectonic plates into each other in the beginning the system is at equilibrium just as the plate the sand pile is in equilibrium in the flat state but eventually as the tectonic plates Kip keeps squeezing into each other you get into a state that is further and further and further out of equilibrium and again the earthquakes then will become bigger and bigger and bigger because the forces will become bigger and bigger and bigger and the law for the sand slides in the sand slide models is exactly equivalent to what is called the Gutenberg nature of law for earthquakes namely that every time you have say one earthquake of size six you have ten or three exercise five and hundred earthquake of size four and so on and the sand pile model exhibits precisely this feature so that gives it understanding of why we have this very peculiar law for earthquakes actually what it means is that the crust of the earth on which we are walking is that what we call a critical state it's precisely as this sand pile when it's at this state where it can grow no further so this is incomplete this is completely different from the usual picture that people have or what's going on around us namely that we thought of think of things as being in some kind of equilibrium but nothing could be further from the truth if this view of nature is correct then we're not living in a nice stable gently evolving world and universe as we once thought instead we're part of us which is just balanced between order and disorder anti chaos nature's yearning for order is counteracted by chaos understanding the rules of chaos and anti chaos may finally be leading us to a clear view of the complex environment we live in and create manipulating the rules of complexity might offer a glimpse of the future and may one day permit us to control our own destiny flee from the equations of anti chaos new life-forms are stirring working from just a few simple principles a rich variety of extraordinary forms spring spontaneously from the ground they compete the space and evolved a stable environment is created as the rules of anti chaos are observed order arrives perhaps the most profound problem in biology is how life itself started of course nobody knows there really are two broad views one is that life is based on the special properties of the magical double helix that everyone knows about either DNA molecules or RNA molecules what I wanted to find myself for years is a deeper grounds to think that life is in a sense an absolutely expected property of complex chemical systems I want it to be the case if you will that that we're at home in the universe that life is spontaneous natural and almost inevitable and I think that that's the case there is some proof that life inevitably emerged from the primordial seas of Earth four million years ago if the basic chemicals in the sea are subjected to a violent electrical discharge such as lightning the result is a set of fundamental compounds the chemical building blocks of all living things anti chaos suggests that this is no accident it's inevitable but individual chemicals will cluster together and organize themselves into more complex ones let's imagine the build-up and behavior of the the imagined primordial soup life emerged about 3.8 billion years ago just a hundred million years after the crust was cool enough to support liquid water so we have to imagine that there were some organic molecules around carbon and methane and so on carbon dioxide methane and so on that were gradually build up with the more complex kinds of organic molecules creating this hoped for primordial soup Kaufman's theory involves the well known chemical principle of catalysis in which the catalyst persuades two molecules to combine more readily than if left to their own devices many of the functions of living organisms depend on this process but in the primordial soup this process alone is not enough to explain how all the necessary ingredients for life were formed Stuart Kaufman's come up with the idea of autocatalytic sets in this process catalysis takes place to produce a chemical which then combines with another to produce yet another sort of molecule and so on until the correct chemicals are present to make some more of the catalysts Auto catalysis is a self-reinforcing reaction if in fact life emerged has such a collective auto catalytic sets of molecules then it would appear to be the case that the routes to the formation of life are much more probable than we've expected so we might hope to find it for example on other promising planets and other solar systems in effect life as the consequence of broad boulevards of possibility not back alleys of thermodynamic and probability the potential for life to order itself spontaneously doesn't however automatically explain everything for instance how did life once formed then evolved into relatively few distinct groups of organisms each sharing many common features there's been a very strong underlying pattern to all of evolution the question is where does that order come from now in the conventional view that order is basically imposed by historical succession and by natural selection so you have a process in which virtually anything is possible you get random variations and those structures which are useful like the eye or the limb leaf the flower they are stabilized by natural selection in other words the Darwinian view but if evolution is seen as a complex system in which order spontaneously arises from randomness then the concept of natural selection becomes redundant what we see is the origin of this order the I relief the limb whatever it may be is the intrinsic dynamics of developing organisms and complex dynamic system and therefore the emphasis is shifted from natural selection as an external force to the robust dynamics of development as the generator of these forms for instance the I we see as a highly probable structure something that once you understand the principles of development in vertebrates you realize that eyes are virtually inevitable studying artificial life such as this computer-generated amoeba is starting to suggest the Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is at best incomplete in fact it may be too complicated a set of very simple rules might well be enough to explain how complex life forms real or artificial come into existence one of the things we've learned in the last decade or so of the study of complex systems is that the most interesting complex behavior comes out of not incredibly complicated systems but out of systems which are composed of relatively simple parts but many of them that interact with each other in fairly simple ways even as a consequence many of our formal models the mathematical and computer models that we use to study complex systems involve simulating or treating mathematically very very simple parts that interact with each other in the context of some environment and one of the systems has been used the most is something called a cellular automaton cellular automata consists of a grid of tiny squares the action of any one of them is dependent on the action of the adjoining squares this system of replicating loops is built up from a series of very simple rules programmed into each cell once a loop has surrounded itself with copies there's no longer any space for it to reproduce and it dies as the process of reproduction continues one ends up with a an expanding colony of loops that spread out throughout this two-dimensional cellular automaton universe consisting of a growing reproductive fringe surrounding an ever expanding core or central region of dead loops but it was surprising that what I ended up with was something which is very reminiscent of the growth of say a tree where the central core of the tree consists of dead cells and only the bark and the and the layer right under the bark is alive growing out and expanding or for instance the growth of a coral reef where the the outermost surface consists of living animals that are building their shells upon the shells of their dead ancestors but is it life in all its color and richness hardly by studying the animals and plants of the rain forests it's been possible to create a whole universe inside a computer in the artificial environment digital life-forms behave just like creatures of flesh and blood the inhabitants of Tiarra live by only two rules reproduce and mutate well I started studying the computer as if I were an ecologist looking at the computer as an environment that could be inhabited my life and I thought about what are the resources that these digital organisms would need and I came to think of the computer's memory as the space that they would live in and the central processing time as the analog of energy that would drive the organisms so I wrote a computer program that could reproduce itself and I designed a special computer for it to live in and I would run this self reproducing program in a computer that would mutate the programs it would mutate it by flipping bits so that the offspring programs wouldn't always be like the parent the first creature to populate this world is red it evolves from the primordial soup of the computer memory as it does so it occasionally mutates so that a new kind of creature is created if the mutation that makes beings that breed faster than the original red creature they start to take over this universe surprisingly even in this digital world many things occur that are recognizable or I recognize from having worked in the rain forest right away things appear that take advantage of the original program these are parasites they borrow information from the original program and once the parasites become very common then other things come along that take advantage of the parasites they steal their energy so we see a long succession of forms where whatever is successful becomes a target for some new form of parasite that takes advantage of it all of this complex behavior results from just two simple instructions or reproduce and mutate as time passes in the computer universe the creatures learn to trust one another and almost predictably others then cheat on the society this is disturbingly close to the way most life-forms have evolved well I consider this to be real evolution the only thing that's not real is the medium that it's evolving in but one thing we can learn from that is that regardless of what the medium is whether it's the chemistry of carbon and hydrogen or the chemistry of bits we still get the same sort of processes the the life process itself takes on these forms in Tierra moreover the patterns of the digital extinctions match those in the real world as displayed in the fossil record they also follow the overall patterns of pair backs sand piles the arrival of a new creature is like the addition of another grain of sand to the pile when there are too many animals there's an extinction too many sand grains there's an avalanche as new animals or grains are arriving the system is delicately balanced on the edge of chaos many natural systems are similarly poised the most complex behavior that we observe in both the physical systems that we see in nature and also in the systems that we study in computers seem to occur at a point which we call the edge of chaos it's a point when these systems are sort of just melting from a very ordered frozen regime to a disordered or random regime right at the transition point between the two is where we see them exhibiting their most complex behavior understanding the junction between order and disorder might for instance allow us to explain for the first time how once dominant economies can slip into decline and for it might help us comprehend the sometimes bizarre behavior of the stock market or understand how currencies can fluctuate wildly and seemingly randomly conventional economic theories cannot explain these events the boundaries of anti chaos might be able to but it's not the thing from a complexity point of view you'd begin to see the economy not as something that's static that's reached an equilibrium that's basically in a sense dead the economy you begin to see is something that's always unfolding it's always reforming new patterns it's forming into think of the cities out there they're forming patterns of settlement those patterns form and reform over decades and centuries so we're starting to view the economy not as a sort of static system but one can sort of study through a microscope like a dead specimen in a lab but we're starting to see it almost as alive something that's always unfolding it's always changing that is in a sense always evolving and this point of view is starting to make us look at the economy very much as an evolving complex system rather than a simple static system an example of how unpredictable markets can be was the battle between the two domestic video recorder systems in the late 1970s Betamax was technologically slightly superior to VHS yet surprisingly VHS sales started to outstrip those of Betamax traditional economics predicts that the Betamax system should then have enjoyed increased demand more sales and the market would have been pulled back into equilibrium this did not happen in other words there was an outcome to the situation that classical theory couldn't predict when I realize that an economic secret of more than one solution to the same problem is absolutely horrified me and horrified a lot of my colleagues and some of my former professors even we were used to thinking in economics that there was only one solution to any given economic problem at least that was the dominant mode of thinking and that that solution in some way we could prove was the best of all feasible worlds that is that this solution that you see out there that the economy has arrived at is the best of all feasible worlds that England could do at the moment yet here was I and other people thinking this way showing that for any given economic problem there might be more than one solution there might be two solutions there might be 100 solutions who might be infinite number of solutions that would mean and this was the real horror of the whole thing that would mean that we might have ended up with the solution that was not the best of all feasible world's Ryan arthur has found that economies both national and international operate rather like pair backs and piles an economic system builds towards a stable state but to maintain that state there are frequent major disturbances financial avalanches the system is finally balanced on the edge of chaos anteye Kaos opens a window of order onto the seeming chaos of the stock market and makes it possible to build computer models of the way the market works we've designed a system that predicts the behavior of financial markets works on a pretty simple principle we go back through the historical record of financial data and we look for patterns in price movements and other factors that relate to economic markets and we do a lot of tests to see what those patterns reproduce that is - the patterns happen again and again and are they statistically significant and we use those patterns when they occur to predict markets we get data feeds from all over the world and our computers are looking at those data feeds all the time they're looking for certain patterns a certain set of prices goes off a certain other set of prices goes down the computer makes a prediction about what the markets are gonna do and it does a computation to figure out how we should what we should buy and what we should sell in order to make the most money based on those predictions this is a day order for account prediction company I am an British Pound futures market you're checking the British Pound they were it's a British Pound the mathematical tools that we were using developed out of the quest or finding order in chaos and we're using that order to make better predictions even though chaotic systems are unpredictable over the long term they're more predictable than traditional random processes over the short term and we cut our teeth as it were analyzing systems that we knew were were chaotic it's not clear that that's really pertinent to the to the markets but on the other hand the techniques do seem to give us better predictive power that doesn't mean the markets are really simple chaotic systems but it does mean these techniques have value so far the trading is not real the system is on trial and the money made is hypothetical but the ideas seem to work 28 for the success of our computer system would put us at the top of performance of people who are trading out in the real market it's always a bit difficult because when you pick the winners retrospectively you're picking out what might have just been somebody who got lucky it's it's easy it's it's if you take five years worth of trading there's always going to be somebody that's had a run of good luck but our results put us out near the top of that he understand economies make a fortune in stocks and shares can anti chaos also save the planet here in the Arizona desert the ecosystem is delicately balanced Tom Malone is studying a plot of land which has been subjected to an unusual experiment for the last 15 years typically the landscape is dominated by drought resistant shrubs and thin vegetation at the start of the study several large square plots of land were fenced off a single rodent the kangaroo rat was removed from these areas and kept out by a system of gates which let all the other native creatures roam freely 15 years later these plots of desert land have been dramatically transformed on the plots where we excluded kangaroo rats two species of grass increased dramatically one species increased tenfold the second species increased threefold the results were completely unexpected when we first excluded the kangaroo rats I don't think we would have been able to predict that the vegetation itself would change within those plots we made simple predictions about the response of other grand boars like the ants but at that time fifteen years ago we had no idea that the removal of kangaroo rats would change the vegetation type on those plots because ecosystems are so complex and sit just on the junction between chaos and anti chaos a small perturbation in the system by adding one grain of sand to a sand pile can set off an avalanche of chain what happens has proved almost impossible to predict but anti chaos is taking us closer to understanding these sorts of complex phenomena and being able to predict is just the first part of man's ultimate ambition to understand means to control at first heavier-than-air flight was a dream early attempts at flying vehicles imitated birds and was spectacularly unsuccessful then scientists discovered the principles behind aerodynamics by applying them we now have aircraft that can carry us a lot in great comfort in extraordinary ways or at high speed relatively simple systems such as the dynamics of flight which are basically linear respond well to our attempts at control complex nonlinear systems have so far proved done conquerable we understand for instance how rain clouds are formed and why rain falls for the last 30 to 40 years scientists have attempted to make rain they flown over drought ridden areas sowing chemicals seeds into the air to try and persuade water vapor to become rain but they but early failed to make nature bend to their will yet we are now a long way from blind belief in supernatural forces which controlled the chaotic world on our way science has given us a way to understand a universe which obeys simple laws but in doing so we seem to have lost sight of the complexity and the unity of the world around us now anti chaos may be leading us to the next stage understanding how complex patterns arise which would mean being able to explain why technologically advanced societies evolve then die out it might even mean that we're on the point of realizing the dreams of scientists to understand finally the laws that govern nature next Sunday at 7 o'clock Equinox updates its investigation into the strange phenomenon of crop circles

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Keywords: Chaos Theory (Idea), Anti-chaos, order

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Length: 50min 43sec (3043 seconds)

Published: Fri May 02 2014