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Material Type: Notes; Class: Math in the Modern World (C); Subject: Mathematics; University: University of Texas - El Paso; Term: Unknown 1989;
Typology: Study notes
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By Ralph Losey At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) The rapidly accelerating discoveries of Chaos are overtaking our worldview. They teach us that Newton, and indeed almost all of the pre-chaos scientists, were dead wrong in their basic view of the Universe. They thought that there was a predictable cause and effect for everything, and that everything happened according to fixed physical laws. They believed in certainties, not probabilities. Their fundamental image of the Universe was a big clock. The presence of a divine being was only necessary to make the clock and wind it up. After He created the Universe, all “God” had to do was sit back and watch. The laws would operate in a predictable causal fashion. Old science actually used to think that if you only knew all of the initial conditions, how the clock worked, you could predict what would happen at any point in time. Science assumed that everything could be known and eventually predicted. The Universe was ruled by a detailed system of unchanging laws. Cosmos and causality reigned supreme. There was no room for chaos and so it was conveniently swept under the rug. The inevitable outcome of the ordered machine view was the complete winding down of the clock, the end of time in complete entropy
Then along came the Science of Chaos in the last part of this century to show that causality did not apply everywhere else as thought. In fact close measurements revealed that the unpredictable appeared in what was previously believed to be the most ordered and predictable of systems, the swinging of a simple pendulum - the very heart of a clock. As James Gleick's book Chaos shows the brave early explorers of Chaos found that Science had been fooling itself for centuries by ignoring tiny deviations in its data and experiments. If a number was slightly off what the causal laws predicted, the pre-chaos scientists simply assumed there was an error in measurement in order to uphold the sanctity of the law itself. In order to preserve their pseudo-cosmos, scientists limited their investigation to closed and artificial systems, avoiding the turbulence of open systems like the plague. Causality was the prime assumption behind all pre-chaos science and it never occurred to anyone to question it. This conceptual bias created a blind spot of enormous proportions. But the reality of open systems, the Chaos lurking behind all order, would not be denied. The charade of perfect order and fudged experimental data could not last forever. By the nineteen seventies it began to crumble, the conceptual blinders were falling from the eyes of more and more scientists. By the nineteen eighties the fly in the ointment, the unpredictable results in what should have been perfect predictability, could no longer be denied. The Science of Chaos was born. Our understanding of the world will never be the same. After nearly two decades now of work by Chaoticians made up of the leading scientists and mathematicians in a wide variety of fields, the evidence is overwhelming. The world is not a gigantic clock where everything happens in an ordered and predictable manner. The real world is fundamentally disordered, free. Chaos reigns over predictability. Simple, linear systems which are causal and predictable are the exception in the Universe, not the rule. Most of the Universe works in jumps, in a non-linear fashion that can not be exactly predicted. It is infinitely complex. Freedom and free will - the Strange Attractors - prevail over rules and determinacy. Yet Chaos is no enemy and destroyer of Cosmos, for from out of Chaos a higher order always appears, but this order comes spontaneously and unpredictably. It is "self-organized." The creation of the Universe is an ongoing process, not just a one time event at the beginning. All and everything - and everyone - is part of this creative process. Over time all systems - from molecules, to life, to galactic clusters - are continually creating new organizations and patterns from out of featurelessness and chaos. The world is not a Clock, it is a Game, a Game of Chance and Choice. In the game random processes - chance and serendipity - allow room for free will, individuality and unpredictable creativity. The Universe is governed by laws, but the laws are of a different kind than previously thought. Like the common law system, the Laws of Wisdom are inherently flexible. They are not written in stone, they are general. They leave infinite room for creativity within certain general parameters. A few fundamental principals exist to establish the parameters, but the Law governs much more loosely than previously thought. The Laws are subject to changes and modifications over time and depend upon the particular facts. Like the common law, the Laws of Nature appear to have flexibility; many things are decided on a case by case basis. Self organization is the rule, not the exception. Everything is not pre-determined by a rigid and