In 1993, the original “Jurassic Park” film brought chaos theory to a wide audience. In that movie, the character of Ian Malcolm predicts that the act of bringing back the dinosaurs for this park will cause “terrible instability” (to paraphrase what he said). Many in the film’s audience probably wondered why they made a mathematician into such a prominent character for this movie. But, if you listen to this audiobook, you will see why they did so. Chaos theory has much to tell us about how unpredictable the world is. Thus, there’s more to chaos theory than what you’ve heard in “Jurassic Park” – although I love that movie, and its summary of this field. This audiobook explores the subject, and tells us what this mysterious area is all about.
They start off by talking about the mathematical concept of “fractals.” To quote Wikipedia, a fractal is “a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension.” (see source) But fractals can be a little hard to describe without a visual aid. Thus, I will refer interested readers to Wikipedia’s visuals here (like the one shown below). This discussion of fractals forms the basis of their entire discussion of chaos theory. They then transition more into talking about chaos theory proper. There is the famous metaphor of the “butterfly effect,” where a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could (in theory) cause a tornado in Texas.
Sierpinski carpet, a fractal image
Later on, they get into the concept of self-organization. This is a phenomenon that has been observed even in some non-living systems, such as the formation of hurricanes. One might describe it as a sort of “spontaneous order.” Charles Darwin had made this kind of claim with his theory of evolution, and Adam Smith had made a similar claim with his metaphor of the “invisible hand.” This seems counter-intuitive, as though it were violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This famous law says that order breaks down into disorder (or “chaos”). But, under certain conditions, chaos can also turn itself into order. As someone with economics training, I was very interested in this aspect of chaos theory. Chaos theory has been applied somewhat to economics, as well as to the natural sciences. Some applications to psychology have been discovered as well. That is, our brains function at the edge of order and chaos. Too much order would hinder our ability to adapt to our environments. But too much chaos would hinder our ability to control ourselves, and the tools that we use to promote our self-interest. Thus, we thrive at the edge between order and chaos – between yin and yang, as the Chinese might put it. This is a powerful argument.
Ilya Prigogine, a chaos theorist
Later on, they get into how computers have been used to study chaos theory. This involves the concept of “emergent computing,” with a popular 1970s computer simulation called “Life.” This gives the inaccurately-named “artificial life,” which might be better styled as “simulated life.” They also go into notions of artificial intelligence, which was still in its infancy when this audiobook first came out in 1993. This audiobook can make one’s head hurt after a while. This is hardly surprising, given that the audiobook is titled “Complexity & Chaos.” But, as with most twentieth-century science, this can get pretty complicated. Incidentally, this seems to be the last installment in their “Science & Discovery” series, narrated by Edwin Newman.
Benoit Mandelbrot, a chaos theorist
Part of me wonders what developments have come in this field, since this audiobook was first released in 1993. But this is still a reasonably good introduction to the history of science – and, in the case of this installment, to the history of mathematics. If the reader will pardon a pun, it helps to “bring order out of the chaos.”
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If you liked this post, you might also like:
Part of an audiobook series
Science & Discovery
Complexity & Chaos
See also the audiobook series
The Giants of Philosophy
Others to be covered later
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