Random Thought

Searching for order in chaos is the motivation behind all of science, which can loosely be described as the search for pattern in the universe. So, does nature have any pattern and order beneath it?

"Does nature obey rules, and is it in any sense predictable?" Around 1600, Galileo discovered that timing the swing of pendulum is a very predictable and regular motion: its swing always took the same time and two pendulums of the same length had the same period. This is remarkable, considering the number of factors that might effect the swing of the pendulum including the motion of the air, irregularities in its the shape and differences in the strength of the push that you give it to start it off.

Several years later, Sir Isaac Newton described the fundamental laws of motion of the universe. Before Newton the world was seen as an unpredictable place in which events seemed to happen at more or less at random. Suddenly, many of the phenomena in this world could not only be explained, but also their future motions predicted.

Later in late 19th century and early 20th, James Clerk Maxwell predicted the existence of radio waves and Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity. All these discovery, made some scientists rather over-confident in their powers of prediction, indeed in the 19th century the great French mathematician Laplace said:

If we were to know with precision the positions and speeds of all the particles in the universe then we could predict the future with certainty.

Despite the confidence and scientific achievements, weather phenomena and the long-term effects of climate change seem to be very unpredictable and the idea of scientific predictability fits uncomfortably with human behaviour and the notion of free will.

Two big scientific discoveries have indeed challenged the notion of predictability. The first is quantum theory which gives a fantastic explanation of behaviour on the atomic scale, based - almost paradoxically - on a fundamental uncertainty of the precise behaviour of sub-atomic particles.

The second one is chaos theory that provide hint on the behaviour of the unpredictable phenomena like weather. The true essence of chaos - a simple mechanical system which we feel we should understand, yet which outsmarts us. All chaotic systems share these two features of being fundamentally simple (in that they are described by straightforward mathematical equations) and yet being unpredictable and unrepeatable, with the smallest changes having enormous effects later on. This is often called the "Butterfly effect". Lorenz, one of the chaos pioneers in the 1960s, captured the essence of this concept by remarking that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Borneo could lead to a hurricane in Florida.