Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Our Universe: orderly or chaotic?


It is broadly believed, that our world is orderly: planets circle the sun and our bodies are some how symmetric. The belief in an ordered universe is so common, that many people use it as a proof for the existence of god in terms of an intelligent creator (+). In that picture, disorders in the universe are assumed as some "noise".



Also if we ignore, that even these regularities are actually some approximations, can we also discount the surfaces and inner parts of those planets and stars? Then they are in no way euclidean! Highly energetic gases in the interstellar space form stars and galaxies, randomly. If we look at some pictures of the universe, it seems to be very chaotic. And fortunately, it is not necessary to go so far to see that nature is more chaotic than expected.

Professor Briggs and Professor Peat tell us in in the first chapter of their fantastic book "seven life lessons of chaos" how to engage with chaos to become more creative in fining solutions. So did I: Chaos is around us; so it was not necessary to go through some physics and chemistry theories to show that our world is chaotic. And I didn't go through pictures by NASA or biologists, I just went through some photos from my vacations and selected two of them (the Photo above was also shot by a friend):

France and the Atlantic ocean
The first picture is from southwest France. To discover chaos, look at the forms of sand and ocean. Imagine how their elements change randomly directions. Enjoy the behaviors of people, birds and animals around the ocean (enjoying the chaos is another lesson from the named book to be learned).

A garden in Iran
The Photo above is a picture of an artificially nature: some people in Iran decided to plant some trees to fight the development of deserts. Even though people have set plants in regular distances and have pruned the branches, the leaves and new branches grew randomly.

As we see, it is not hard to find chaos. We have just to look around: We find it every were.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting topic to think about and nicely illustrated. Systems theory might give us some further insights...

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    1. thank you Frank. Let us talk about systems theory next days.

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