Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life. John Gribbin
John Gribbin
Language: English
Pages: 253
ISBN: 2:00073294
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
'Gribbin takes us through the basics with his customary talent for accessibility and clarity' - "Sunday Times". The world around us can be a complex, confusing place. Earthquakes happen without warning, stock markets fluctuate, weather forecasters seldom seem to get it right - even other people continue to baffle us. How do we make sense of it all? In fact, John Gribbin reveals, our seemingly random universe is actually built on simple laws of cause and effect that can explain why, for example, just one vehicle braking can cause a traffic jam; why wild storms result from a slight atmospheric change; even how we evolved from the most basic materials. Like a zen painting, a fractal image or the pattern on a butterfly's wings, simple elements form the bedrock of a sophisticated whole. Synthesizing chaos and complexity theory for the perplexed, "Deep Simplicity" brilliantly illuminates the harmony underlying our existence.
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languages. 24. There is one other parameter, to do with the choice of Boolean rules, that affects these systems, but this is a kind of fine-tuning and does not affect the fundamental point we are making. 1. See, for example, Evolution by Carl Zimmer, or The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner. 2. See Carl Zimmer, Evolution, p. xii. 3. The same argument applies to plants, of course. We just describe it in terms of animal life since that emphasizes that it applies to us as well.
systems settle into is called an attractor. In the example shown on p. 28, the attractor is a single point at the bottom of the bowl. But an attractor can also be a spread-out region, as in this illustration. The marble on the hill is bound to roll off into the valley, but everywhere in the valley bottom is equally attractive. This is no mere pedantry. Borrowing an example from Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers,7 if two containers are joined by a relatively narrow pipe and filled with a
exactly the same geometric convergence, with the same ratio, 4.669:1. He had found a universal truth, and received the ultimate accolade of having the mysterious number that came out of these calculations, 4.669, named after him.3 Figure 3.2a Simplified representation of the kind of self-similar branching seen in the Feigenbaum diagram. There are many other examples of period doubling as a route to chaos, all with interesting things happening just at the transition from simplicity to chaos.
is noise. At one extreme, the direct contrast with noise would be what is called white noise, which is completely random, and at the other extreme the contrast would be with a pure signal containing just one frequency, like a single musical note. As the names suggest, these phenomena were first discussed in acoustics, where the signals being investigated are sound waves; white noise is the boring hiss of static you get from an AM radio tuned away from any station, a single frequency ‘noise’ would
next shock at random in accordance with the specified statistical rules. The surprising and dramatic result was that for all but a few extreme versions of this game the system settles down into a critical state in which the pattern of extinctions obeys a power law similar to the one we see in the pattern of extinctions in the actual fossil record. 11 One way to think of this is that just as tension builds up in an earthquake zone until something has to give (but you can’t say in advance how big
