Randomness & God: Templeton Prize 2008

This past march, Michal Heller was awarded the 2008 Templeton Prize, an honor that groups him with other prize winners as "entrepreneurs of the spirit"— defined by John Templeton as  outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to those aspects of human experience that, even in an age of astonishing scientific advance, remain beyond the reach of scientific explanation. (more)

I have written before about past winners, and of research sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. Yet I have not found explicit writing that attempts to join together the separate strands of science and the divine through the prism of chaos until I read some of Heller's works. This may be because of his very obvious dual hats: Heller is both a cosmologist and Catholic priest, who managed to thrive in communist Poland.

Heller is really interested in the ultimate beginnings of everything. His work and speculation must necessarily include theology because his target is the start of everything before there was a Start to Everything:

Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one… (and) there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great Blueprint of God's thinking the universe, the question on ultimate causality…: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.

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Preparing for Chaos: Patently Lame

The Boston Molasses DisasterIt seems tautological that it's impossible to get ready for Chaos. Yet a recent patent application by researchers at IBM claims to do just that. In their System and method for optimizing the selection, verification, and deployment of expert resources in a time of chaos Robert Friedlander, Richard Hennessy, Anwer Mujahid Khan and James Kraemer describe:

A computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer usable program code for finding skills and resources for a chaotic event. Skills data for the chaotic event are organized. A determination is made whether the skills and the resources are available in response to a receiving an identification of the skills and the resources that are required to manage the chaotic event. The skills and the resources are optimized based on requirements and constraints, potential skills, and enabling resources to determine optimized skills and optimized resources. The availability of the optimized skills and the optimized resources are verified. The optimized skills and the optimized resources are reoptimized in response to a determination that the optimized skills and the optimized resources are unavailable.

Pardon my skepticism here - while what is described here certainly seems laudable, it doesn't sound like much more than a nice robust system that links resources with those who need them. The word "chaos" is being (mis)appropriated to add some juice to the patent claim. There ain't no chaos here, at least not in the sense of CHAOS Theory. The word chaos then doesn't convey anything more than a hook for readers and , presumably, patent examiners.

Maybe the authors do better in actually describing a chaotic event. See what you think:

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Van Gogh's Turbulent Period

Starry Starry night,
Vortices swirl around each star,
Eddies within eddies from near and far
With flows that know the darkness in my soul..

OK. Enough Don McClean. This post is about Van Gogh and his uncanny ability to depict reality in an unreal way, raising once again the question: Do certain artists have an ability to capture physical process and /or mathematical truths that can't be mimicked by others? And is there a correlation with this ability and madness?

Where Jackson Pollock's paintings are instantiations of splattered fractals, Van Gogh's paintings have recently been compared to one of the main avatars of chaos theory: turbulence.

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Chaords, Credit Cards, and Complexity

Framework Complexity - the Pater Noster LighthouseIn the I-don't -know-how-I-missed-this department, I was quite surprised, but not-shocked , to hear that someone had coined a term to try to capture the world's uncanny ability to present both chaos and order. Dee Hock, former CEO of VISA coined the term "chaordic" to describe conditions that are either present and/or needed in organizations and their leadership in order to maximize the potential for success. For more detail, check out a review of Hock's book Birth of the Chaordic Age. Published in 1999, Hock defines both chaords and chaordic. I'll just go with the noun here:

(kay'ord) 1: any autocatalytic, self-regulating, adaptive, nonlinear, complex organism, organization, or system, whether physical, biological or social, the behavior of which harmoniously exhibits characteristics of both order and chaos. 2: an entity whose behavior exhibits patterns and probabilities not governed or explained by the behavior of its parts. 3: the fundamental organizing principle of nature and evolution.

Coming from the CEO of one of the most successful enterprises of all time, I guess he can call "it" - that special stuff that made VISA what it is -  whatever he wants.

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Constructal Theory of Everything?

A very interesting text that describes what appears to be a bold new approach to modeling many possible systems - even human ones - is about to be released. Titled Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics and  edited by Adrian Bejan and Gilbert W. Merkx, the text "brings together for the first time social scientists and engineers to develop a predictive theory of social organization, as a conglomerate of mating flows that morph in time to flow more easily (people, goods, money, energy, information). These flows have objectives (e.g., minimization of effort, travel time, cost), and the objectives clash with global constraints (space, time, resources). The result is organization (flow architecture) derived from one principle of configuration evolution in time (the constructal law): "for a flow system to persist in time, its configuration must morph such that it provides easier access to its streams."

Begin and Merkx are from Duke. The Duke press release  is very enticing - this is certainly a text that will serve as a reference for the chaos and fractals course, or perhaps a primary source.

Some tantalizing tidbits:

Why does a railway network look like a river? Why do the streets of old Rome look like a leaf? Because whether their shape is determined by the interactions of molecules or the choices made by individual humans, all of these systems of flow are governed by a relatively simple new principle of thermodynamics.

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In Search of the Fastest Rubik's Quark in the World

Magnetic/Acrylic Rubik by NTronicsThere's a great scene in the Pursuit of Happyness in which Christopher, the protagonist played by Will Smith, becomes infatuated with his son's Rubik's Cube, and ultimately goes on to be a Cube Solver. In a chance encounter with a stockbroker he is trying to impress, Chris/Will solves the cube - a feat that blows away the broker, and which leads to an interview, and then...I won't go on here - rent the movie, it is a good one, and based on a true story.

Back to the Cube. Jessica Fridrich of SUNY Binghamton, who completed a Ph.D. in non-linear dynamics (Removing observational uncertainty from orbits of nonlinear dynamical systems) is something of a cube speed freak. Consider that she won the First Czechoslovak Championship in Rubik's Cube in 1982. At the top of her game she " routinely solved the cube in an average time of 17 seconds...actively using more than 100 algorithms." You'll find some of her solution techniques and algorithms here. You'll also find links to other speeders, including sage advice on how to grease your cube.

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Newtonian Determinism and Pathological Aloneness

Newton's Alchemical manuscript. Click to  enlarge.Newton's Laws applied to physical situations describe a Universe that is totally deterministic. For scientist-modelers, the canonical methodology for predicting future events is based on Newton's process: stuff the initial conditions of a system into the appropriate "laws", and let time increase in the resulting equations of motion. Here's your prediction as a time series extending as far out into the future as you need. Next problem!

Chaos theory does not violate this Newtonian modeling process. Instead, chaos demonstrates that the equations of motion are so non-linear that small inaccuracies in the initial conditions lead to wildly varying future predictions - the so-called sensitive dependence on initial conditions that is the foundation of the butterfly effect. In effect prediction becomes limited in many situations, with weather one of the chief systems where predictability is desperately needed, but often leaves all of us wondering where the TV weather people ever got their degrees...So prediction is diminished, even though determinism is as strong as ever.

I was thinking about Newton's legacy of determinism as I read a piece on Newton written several years ago by James Gleick for Slate, titled Isaac Newton's Gravity. Gleick, the author of the text that brought Chaos to the masses (Chaos - The making of a new Science) is also the author of a well-received 2003 bio of Sir Isaac.

Gleick argues convincingly for the need to display Newton's achievements in the context of his rather bizarre life (of which the pathological aloneness in the title of this post is one of Gleick's signature descriptions). In this his approach reminds me very much of the recent biographies of Einstein.

Was Newton as methodical as the way physics is now presented seems to suggest? Were his life, beliefs, etc., a product of immutable beliefs and processes?

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Strange Bedfellows in the Climate Change Debate

Chaos Theory by Chromasia.com. click to enlargeAn excellent web site titled The Discovery of Global Warming is provided by the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics.

Created by Spencer Weart, the Director of the Center, this is the best site I have seen on climate modeling and climate change by far. Fully hypertextual, you'll find everything from the first mention of greenhouse gases to political ramifications and chicanery, to a very detailed description of General circulation models.

But the best is the section on Chaos in the Atmosphere , which provides an enormous amount of detail on atmospheric modeling well before Lorenz, and well beyond. From the intro:

...in the 1950s, work with slightly more complex physical and computer models turned up hints that even quite simple systems could lurch in unexpected ways. During the 1960s, computer experts working on weather prediction realized that such surprises were common in systems with realistic feedbacks. The climate system in particular might wobble all on its own without any external push, in a "chaotic" fashion that by its very nature was unforeseeable.

Skeptics of global warming usually fixate on the idea behind the statement "the climate system in...might wobble all on its own without any external push, in a "chaotic" fashion that by its very nature was unforeseeable." They'll use this to discount any effect of carbon emissions, i.e. human-produced climate change.

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The Terrible Tao of Chaotic Career Moves

Myron Cope and his Terrible Towel: Pittsburgh broadcaster or Chaos Theorist?With a field of study as rich in language and imagery as chaos and fractals, it is inevitable that whole bodies of research will develop that find the theory and results of chaos & fractals applicable in totally improbable situations. It used to be that quantum physics was the leader in this phenomena, with the Tao of Physics  by Fritjof Capra the ur-text that promised a much more balanced outlook on life informed by wave/particle duality. (And I will note that I still have my copy.) Given the history of this text, I need to introduce a new category of post, which I openly steal from all Pittsburgh friends and readers - The Terrible Tao. The T-Tao designation is given to applications of chaos and fractals - and I might as well throw in complexity - to the most unlikely social situation.

My goal here is not to criticize these efforts, because they represent attempts to find models for social behavior that are grounded in a well-established field - chaos and fractals - that just happens to yield a range of behaviors that are remarkably similar to human and institutional behavior. Actually, with many of the articles appearing in journals well outside of the natural sciences, the writing often contains a self-contained expository section on nonlinear dynamics because a general knowledge of chaos and fractal theory on the part of the journal's audience cannot be assumed. So I am glad that the ideas of chaos and fractals reach a larger audience.

With that said, I often find that the modeling is more a use of chaos and fractals as metaphor - a way to describe human situations with exotic terms such as bifurcation, or homoclinic tangle. As a result, I rarely see any predictive value in the modeling, which, as a result, leaves me no farther along in understanding the situation being modeled.

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Relative Time and Swiss Clocks

The recent books on Einstein by Isaacson and Neffe (see reviews) cover the development of special relativity in great depth, with special attention to the development of an operational definition of time duration that vanquishes the prior notion of simultaneity. Indeed, simultaneity is now accepted as observer-dependent, thanks to Einstein's Special Theory.

Both books do refer to the role played by Poincaré- although "role" is not necessarily the operative term here. No doubt Poincaré was thinking deeply about time, but did not make Einstein's leap to codify the relative nature of time duration.

An excellent book on the Einstein/Poincare connection is Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, by Peter Galison. Here Galison tries to relate Einstein's experience as patent clerk who most likely saw patent proposals for clock synchronization between different Swiss cities to his ongoing thought -experiments in the foundations of physics. ( In a generally very favorable review by R. Wald for Physics Today, this idea is called into question.)

But the Poincaré connection is fascinating because it is not clear to what extent, if any, Poincaré's writings on time were even seen by Einstein. (And the title of the book is itself a play on words, because a Poincaré Map is a fundamental analysis/visualization tool of chaos and fractals.)

The new Einstein bios have really opened up new avenues of thought on how Einstein came to be Einstein. The Poincare connection is fascinating, and a potentially important piece of the answer.

Most amazing of all is the pictures these books paint of the intellectual ferment taking place in Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It is hard to imagine a similarly exhilarating time of new, earth-shattering theories that can possibly duplicate these years for excitement and creative brilliance.