![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Secret Life of Chaos
Jan. 17th, 2010 12:43 pmIn what was probably the best science programme of recent years, The Secret Life of Chaos found Jim Al-Khalili exploring the impact of chaos theory on modern science and mathematics.
Starting with Turing's computational morphology studies, which showed how complexity could emerge from simple systems described by a handful of equations, it moved on to Boris Belousov's fascinating discovery of a chemical oscillator which, when run in a petri dish, showed the sorts of patterns predicted by Turing's theoretical work. This, along with work by Edward Lorenz and Benoît Mandelbrot, was seen as ushering a shift from the classical, clockwork universe of Newton to a chaotic system where patterns an complexity emerge from small perturbations in simple mathematical sets of equations that involve iterative feedback.
In a final tour de force, the programme then fed back into itself, returning to the question of biological complexity with a discussion of evolution as a chaotic system. By expressing evolution as a concentrator for minor differences with natural selection acting as the feedback mechanism, it became possible to understand how the vast complexities of life could emerge from a relatively simple system. This point was backed up with NaturalMotion's work using genetic algorithms to teach bio-mechanical computer simulations to walk and interact with the features of a virtual environment.
This view of nature chimes rather nicely a piece of recent reading: Ernst Mayr's rejection of Platonism, described in The Growth of Biological Thought (anthologised in The Oxford Book of Modern Scientific Writing). Mayr rather neatly describes how Plato's ideas of the world naturally grows out of his background as a geometrist, predisposing him to see the world as a series of distorted versions of perfect geometric shapes (essences), whereas the world is actually more complex, more fractal, with apparently similar patterns repeated with minor changes between individual instances. Thus, I suspect, the rejection of the clockwork view of the universe isn't so much a rejection of Newton as the rejection of the pervasive influence Platonism in post-enlightenment scientific thought.
The programme was pure class from start to finish and I thought the way it pulled together a number of apparently separate elements into a coherent whole was a particular strength. It was a brilliant reminder of the sort of the BBC can do if it really tries...
Starting with Turing's computational morphology studies, which showed how complexity could emerge from simple systems described by a handful of equations, it moved on to Boris Belousov's fascinating discovery of a chemical oscillator which, when run in a petri dish, showed the sorts of patterns predicted by Turing's theoretical work. This, along with work by Edward Lorenz and Benoît Mandelbrot, was seen as ushering a shift from the classical, clockwork universe of Newton to a chaotic system where patterns an complexity emerge from small perturbations in simple mathematical sets of equations that involve iterative feedback.
In a final tour de force, the programme then fed back into itself, returning to the question of biological complexity with a discussion of evolution as a chaotic system. By expressing evolution as a concentrator for minor differences with natural selection acting as the feedback mechanism, it became possible to understand how the vast complexities of life could emerge from a relatively simple system. This point was backed up with NaturalMotion's work using genetic algorithms to teach bio-mechanical computer simulations to walk and interact with the features of a virtual environment.
This view of nature chimes rather nicely a piece of recent reading: Ernst Mayr's rejection of Platonism, described in The Growth of Biological Thought (anthologised in The Oxford Book of Modern Scientific Writing). Mayr rather neatly describes how Plato's ideas of the world naturally grows out of his background as a geometrist, predisposing him to see the world as a series of distorted versions of perfect geometric shapes (essences), whereas the world is actually more complex, more fractal, with apparently similar patterns repeated with minor changes between individual instances. Thus, I suspect, the rejection of the clockwork view of the universe isn't so much a rejection of Newton as the rejection of the pervasive influence Platonism in post-enlightenment scientific thought.
The programme was pure class from start to finish and I thought the way it pulled together a number of apparently separate elements into a coherent whole was a particular strength. It was a brilliant reminder of the sort of the BBC can do if it really tries...
