Everything is In It's Place

Yesterday afternoon I was listening to RadioLab (science show on NPR) and the topic of discussion was "limits." The theme of this entry will differ from that, today I am writing about Order. The program featured an experiment conducted in some lab at some graduate school by some scientists, who wanted to see if they could build a computer with the ability to find order in what is seemingly chaotic. So where did they themselves some chaos? In a contraption that is basically a double pendulum. As you know a single pendulum sways back and forth at a regular pace, but throw another one into the mix and it's apparent chaos. Take a look for yourself:

Erradic, no? Well, what this computer found in a mere 24 hours is something that took humanity millenia to discover... a beautifully simple equation: Force = (Mass)(Acceleration), otherwise known as Newton's second law of motion. This revelation caused me to wonder if chaos is even possible. Apparently things only have a tendency to seem chaotic to us because we don't really understand them; Comprehension is everything! Our knowledge is limited, but theorhetically speaking a computer's isn't. Still, we can't understand the formulas the computer's spits back out to us. In other words, the order is there, but it is incomprehensible. For centuries now humankind was at a high note, where we not only made observations regarding the universe, but actually understood the meaning behind them. This was a brief luxury in our species' history and with the advent of insanely complex technology our limits of comprehension will be left in the realm of mystification.

Everything is in it's place. The bible says that before the universe was created there wasn't "nothing," but something that cannot really be literally translated from the Hebrew ("tohu va vohu"). In a way of speaking, it's nonsense! Chaos, chaos is nonsense. In the beginning there was no order then according to the myth, God made order out of the disorder and it worked just like a well tuned machine. Machines can't run on nonsense, you know. I'm not a religious person, but I think there are insights within these ancient myths that carry a timeless relevance. Thousands of years ago we had an feeling that there must be a system to this topsy turvy world in which we live, and ya know what? We were right.

I find it somewhat poetic that we can't see past the nonsense, past the chaos and disorder. We have a feeling, an inclination towards a universe where all that happens occurs simply because it must. Personally we want our lives to make sense, we want them to mean something within the larger framework; to have all of the injustice and suffering exist for a reason. A reason amidst the chaos that is the human experience. Life makes sense to other creatures, they know their place in the world, to go on existing until it's their time not to. We complicate things because we can't understand where we all fit in this most excellent machine that is the universe. Perhaps it's this very ignorance which provides all of those amazing qualities that make humanity so great (and so terrible... sometimes I feel the two are synonymous.)

You may feel differently, but I can take solace in the fact that I exist because I must. It all happens because it has to.

I'll end with a quote that seems appropriate and funnily enough was my "senior quote" in my high school yearbook. The quote is by author Kurt Vonnegut.

Nice, nice, very nice

Nice, nice, very nice

So many people in the same device

p.s

check out Radiolab. It's fantastic.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/