It was while sitting at stoplights with my car blinker on that I first became interested in Chaos Theory. I didn't realize that was what I was interested in until much later, but it was the start.
Have you ever watched your car blinker relative to the blinker on the car in front of you? Okay, I'd like to know who hasn't waited with nearly breathless anticipation as the blinkers blink completely out of sync and then slowly, slowly, get closer and closer together until that one glorious blink when they're both completely in tune with each other. Then, following that briefest moment of unity, they again go their separate ways until the cycle repeats.
What I've thought about while watching the blinkers is how order and chaos seem to circle each other, seemingly opposing forces in the universe. And yet, once in a while (or more often), they touch, kiss, unify. With car blinkers, it's a fairly straighforward mathematical equation, but since I tend to extrapolate my "deep" thoughts into universal terms (especially when faced with an extraordinarily long stoplight), I wondered about the polarity of all things. If there is opposition in all things, what are the opposites? And if there is order and its opposite, chaos, are they really opposites or, like Janus, two faces of the same god? Can you separate the opposites without damaging the entire nature of...everything? Aren't they inherently linked, and if they are instrinsically linked, what does that mean?
You can imagine my delight when my dad brought over the book, Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness, by John Briggs and F. David Peat. I have dived in headfirst, trying to wrap my mind around strange attractors, iteration paradoxes, fractals, and the ancient Chinese parable of the Mirror People.
All I can say is it's a dang good thing this book is illustrated.
What is so fascinating to me about all of this is that we know nothing. We are infants -- less than infants -- in our understanding of The Big Picture. When I think about how difficult we find it to predict anything that has more than two or so factors, I just get all giddy. Here we have what would seem an ordered, Newtonian reductionist universe, and suddenly! nothing is what it seems. Order and chaos swirl violently, like oil and water, but still mix at some astonishingly regular points, and we are still astonished. How fun is all of this?
Rather than bore you with the mathematics (which implies that I actually understand the mathematics but simply don't want to set them in front of you, who don't, and cause you much yawning agony. In reality, it's all a bluff since I need the illustrations to help me understand enough to barely make sense of it all, and I have to close the book and spend long moments pondering what I have just read. So, rather than bore you with the mathematics,), I will let you know if I come up with anything worth blogging about.
The other two books I'm reading are an autobiography about Sam Wyley, the entrepreneur (which I picked up because I have no idea how really successfull entreprenuers think. It's like a foreign land inside their heads), and The Conan Chronicles, by Robert Jordan. But the really interesting one is Turbulent Mirror.
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