GrayWolf

Discuss.

NOTE: This has absolutly no reference to the Order/Chaos series by...I believe Modessit is his name?

Sledge

Define your terms.

GrayWolf

Human beings:

Definatly without control of so much of our bodily functions. Our daily lives, for the most part, are comprised of random incidents which we attribute as excitement that keeps us entertained.

I was thinking about this a lot one day, and thought up the question: Is there an order to the universe, or is it simply governed by pure chaos?

Slims

You can find order in any system. Our universe is not 'based' on anything. But if I had to answer, I would say that our universe is a chaotic one in which order can be found.

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"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." - Winston Churchill

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible." Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence

GrayWolf

Well said.

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They are too young when you start worrying that they might be too young. 18 is my lowest limit. I'm going to be 25 next month.. No piece of ass is worth getting pounded in my own. - Johnny Rotten (I laughed for so long when I read this...)

mr sticky

Are you looking for purpose? Or the ever elusive "meaning of life"?

I believe random factors do assail us, but I also believe that we are complete in control of our desicions. We can't control what is, but what comes, we have great input in.

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The sad thing is... as you get older you come to realize that you don't so much pilot your life, as you just try to hold on, in a screaming, defiant ball of white-knuckle anxious fury

Dragonlich

Everything is chaotic, even my thought patterns and ideas. Some events are more likely than others, but there's still a chance that unlikely things will happen.

eris

Do I even need to answer that?

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allhaileris

CSflim

complexity from simplicity, simplicity from chaos.
Chaos and order are only perceptions of a single unified reality.

There is an inherrent order of the universe. At least that is what science has led us to believe. We hope that this fundamental order will finally reveal itself to us in the Grand Unified Theory. Until then we're left dealing with partial theory, and bits and pieces.

Even the simplest of ordered systems can quite easily "degenerate" into chaos. But withing this chaos is a certain sense of deeper order. Why do you think that images of fractals have such a wide appeal?

The vaugest of answers is all you can expect to the vaguest of questions. Until you define your terms more precisely this is all I can manage.

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filtherton

Everything seems chaotic until you understand it. I believe that we'll probably never understand everything that there is to understand, but nothing is really chaotic.

Johnny Rotten

Since the Universe as we understand it is governed by entropy, the eventual breakdown of all systems, it would seem that we started with order and will end in chaos. Chaos not in the sense of wild anarchy but the complete lack or any system. Proton decay at the end of the universal lifetime as dictated by heat death, the constant expansion and aging of the cosmos. But I'm the spiritual type and believe there's more to the way things work than what we can access with our five senses on a day-to-day basis.

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"The idea that money doesn't buy you happiness is a lie put about by the rich, to stop the poor from killing them." -- Michael Caine

rogue49

Believe it or not, Entropy is considered a degeneration into ORDER.

As an object loses energy, this is equally dispersed throughout the system, thus increasing ORDER.

The funny thing is...Is an object holding energy more "ordered" or more "chaotic"?
Is a thing that is useful, more ordered or chaotic?
More likely both
depending on what context you are talking about.

Is a hand more ordered than air?
Is a glass unbroken more ordered?
Is a clock spring wound more chaotic?

I think people get the ideas of "organization", "categorization", "form", "function" mixed up with "ORDER"
These are different.

If you go with the basic idea of the "Big Bang" creation of the universe.
Then it all started with a void (complete order)
Then the Big Bang happened (complete chaos)
Over time if there is no external or internal increase in energy
(energy/force from elsewhere or an internal "winding")
then the Law of Entropy means a continual loss of energy,
or this degeneration into a greater system.
This smooths out all, and so as the universe passes,
it will return to a void or complete order.

Order & Chaos...there is no good or bad about it,
no positive or negative
no productive or destructive context to it.
It just is...
another perspective.

CSflim

This isn't true.
Entropy is considered a quantity, not an acton. And entropy is defined as a measure of a system's disorder.

If you were to take an empty box, with a partition in the middle. One side contains molecules of oxygen, and the other molecule of nitrogen.
Remove the partition and you have a system which is highly ordered...i.e. LOW entropy.
Over time the oxygen will start to drift into the nitrogen's section, and the nitrogen will start to drift into the oxygen's section. The system is becoming less ordered. Entropy is increasing.
Eventually the box will end up being completely homogeneous: A State of Maximum Entropy. Completely disordered: just a random scattering of oxgen and nitrogen molecules. Complete disorder.

Now the reason scientists use the term "entropy" and not "disorder" is because order/disorder implies subjectivism. Entropy is a well defined term, which is purely objective...no subjective interpretation is required.

So while you personally may feel that a total heat death is a highly ordered system (I don't quite see how you can...but you're entitled to your opinion) it doesn't change the objective fact that it is a state of maximum entropy or complete "disorder" as defined by the thermodynamical laws.

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Elessar

Took the words right out of my keyboard.

Several problems exist with the question itself. If the Universe is "governed" by anything, that would be the laws of physics. (The word "laws" should really be in quotes also, since that implies a certainty which can never really exist in any system of inductive logic, such as Science).


Naturally, order and chaos (or disorder) both exist, but do you mean by your question which state is more natural, or prevalent?

Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute would say that order exists on the edge of chaos. By that, they mean that things can be TOO ordered, like a crystal lattice (ice, etc) where nothing changes, or it can be too chaotic (or disordered) like the turbulence of a body of running water where things change too rapidly for any kind of repeating patterns to emerge. But, somewhere between those two extremes you'll find things that change enough to allow growth and/or evolution, but not so much change as to introduce instability into the system.

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You! Out of the Gene Pool!

The.Lunatic

Everybody has said the same thing, that the universe is chaotic, but everything around us can be represented in numbers, and that these numbers contain patterns. This would imply that fundamentally the universe however chaotic is simplistic, and organized. Just so happens however that these fundamentals allow for every and all possiblities, therefore there is not predicition when everything can and will happen. ( quantum theory )

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Proud memeber of the Insomniac Club.

CSflim

you miss the point of chaos entirely.

You can take an incredibly simple deterministic system, which when set in motion will create chaotic and unpredictable results.
What’s that? A contradiction in terms? Determinism resulting in unpredictability? Surely not!?

Well it's true, due to the butterfly effect. This concept of a butterfly flapping it's wings in Tokyo and causing a hurricane in California is one of the most hideously misunderstood concepts, but it essentially boils down to this:
In a non-linear system any predictions which are not based on perfect knowledge of the system’s initial state very rapidly become meaningless after a length of time.
So in order to make any kind of predictions about a non-linear system, we need to know it's initial state perfectly.
Well, surely very difficult in practice, you might say, but there is nothing stopping us from knowing this in principle (sidestepping Heisenberg for the moment...assume we have magical powers to "see" a system's state without affecting it. ).
Well, it is actually impossible, even in principle, to know the exact state of a system
Think of the simple case of defining exactly the position of a particle. Place it on a Cartesian grid, and write down it's co-ordinates. How many decimal places will you require? To define it's position perfectly, you will need an infinite amount of decimal places!
So any attempt at prediction is limited by our finite knowledge of the system. Deterministic processes can be entirely unpredictable!

So yes, I would hold the view that the universe runs from relatively simple rules. The ultimate goal of physics is to try and understand this set of rules (whether or not it is a realistic goal is irrelevant). But the "simplicity" of the laws does not imply the simplicity of outcome.

I take it from the way you phrased your post, you are referring to the movie pi? I have to say I loved that movie, and I love Darren Arronofsky as a director, but it is vitally important to realise that pi is a fictional story, and the mathematics used in it are not consistent with reality. There are plenty of incorrect mathematical statements made in that film...not that I believe that this should be held against that film. The non-existence of Troll's doesn't take away from the brilliance of The Lord Of The Rings!

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Aias

That, of course, is the main question when dealing with most creation epics, the struggle between Order (creation) and the Chaos which threatens to tear the Order apart. This is why, in many creation epics, we tend to see opposing forces battling each other for power. The battles come as ways to usurp power, obtain power, restore power, etc. The idea here is that One force wishes to exert control over another force.

Most creation epics move in this general direction. God-beings in control are usurped (usually by their progeny) and a newer power takes control. Notice though that the creation epics stop when the world/universe reaches what it is today. It is as if the ideas stop because some power of Order won, giving us the universe we experience today.

Many presocratic philosophers also thought that this was the nature of things, a constant struggle between opposing forces to achieve dominance. When each strives for a hold on the other, they lose their footing to the other. The struggle to achieve this dominance actually achieves balance.

Heraclitus of Ephesus thought of the order of things like a Bow (one used to shoot arrows). The wooden part of the Bow is straining to break free of the string. The string is straining to hold onto the two ends of the bow. If one was to fail, it as well as the other would be rendered useless and no longer would it be a Bow. This is much how Heraclitus saw the universe, a constant strain of forces against and over one another; but if the strain were to ever stop the universe would no longer be the universe.

Similarly, almost a thousand years later, Newton saw the same straining of opposites between things in nature. For example: Newton saw the moon rotating around the earth, held in check by the earth's gravity, but wanting to continue off in a straight line due to the laws of inertia. Since the moon is not allowed to continue in a straight line, but still moves, it revolves around the earth. If inertia were to fail the moon would come crashing into the earth because of gravity. If Gravity were to fail the moon would go off spinning into space.

In this way the struggle between Chaos and Order are preserved. The universe we experience today is simply a reflection of the balance of opposites.

There are theories, however, as many of you have already noted that the universe is slipping more towards entropy. This would appear as though our universe is slowly becoming more chaotic and losing its Ordered state. This theory would certainly point back to a time where everything was completely Ordered. Complete order sounds more like a creation idea than an evolutionary idea to me, but I know little about such things myself.

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But I will seek the meadows by the shore: There will I wash and Purge these stains, if so I may appease Athena's wrath. Then will I find some lonely place, where I may hide this sword, beyond all others cursed, buried where none may see it, deep in earth.

krazixs

I believe the universe is sort of like a painting. Depending on how you are looking at it, it can be chaotic or orderly. Example take a picture. Stick your eye as close to it as possible, from this point it looks like a hodgepodge of different shaded colors, chaotic. Under a microscope, we see threads or pixels, definate color patterns (order). Under say an electron microscope we see a myriad of cells, atoms, various molecular entities, but nothing we can make out or say has any sort of routine (chaotic) Now stand a normal length away. We see a picture of whatever the creator meant when they made it, as far as we know at least (order). Now stand across a busy street from your picture, we know there is a picture, what it looks like or what is on it is hard to say. What colors used or what shape it is, can be questionable.(chaotic)

That's how I believe the universe to be, a paradox of order and chaos, depending on what level of understanding your looking at.

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The Kender in your party has just screamed in fear. Please roll a d20 to see how many of your body parts are still identifiable.

MacGnG

order from chaos

iamjero

Where chaos begins, classical science stops. For as long as the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere, in the fluctuations of the wildlife populations, in the oscillations of the heart and the brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side -- these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities.

I find this subject fascinating... I do believe that the universe is fundamentally chaotic but the really cool thing to me is that once systems reach a certain complexity they create a roadblock to the naturally occuring entrpy of the universe. Its a little (ok, a lot) over my head, but I do know just enough to get myself in trouble.

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"Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?"

- Joseph Stalin

CSflim

The completly ordered universe was the singularity of the big bang.

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Aias

Then the circular question is introduced. If something is Ordered completely and completely ordered, then how could it slip to Chaos?

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But I will seek the meadows by the shore: There will I wash and Purge these stains, if so I may appease Athena's wrath. Then will I find some lonely place, where I may hide this sword, beyond all others cursed, buried where none may see it, deep in earth.

CSflim

I don't don't see where you are deriving your "anti-second law" from?

It was ordered...by the second law it loses its order by the disipation of energy. How did you come to the conclusion that an completly ordered system cannot lose its order?

Also, I would ask people to reffer to the opposite of order as Entropy, or Disorder.
Choas is quite a different (but related) concept to disorder.

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Aias

CSflim,

I'm not sure I grasp what you are trying to say. I'm not trying to be rude or act in any way opposing you, but I just want to understand what you are trying to say. Could you please explain a bit more about what you are trying to say for me?

I think I understand what you mean by the differences between Entropy and Chaos. But I am a little confused about "It was ordered...by the second law it loses its order by the disipation of energy." ?

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But I will seek the meadows by the shore: There will I wash and Purge these stains, if so I may appease Athena's wrath. Then will I find some lonely place, where I may hide this sword, beyond all others cursed, buried where none may see it, deep in earth.

CSflim

Ok, sorry here's my explanation.

You made the observations:
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy (disorder) increases with time.
There is a certain amount of disorder around us today.

From this you came to the (correct) conclusion that at sometime in the past, the universe must have been perfectly ordered.

You then seemed to make the claim that this has some sort of religious connotations? ("Complete order sounds more like a creation idea than an evolutionary idea to me, but I know little about such things myself.")

I explained how no such religious explanation was required, and that the completely ordered system was the big bang singularity.

You then made the unfounded statement that a completely ordered system will remain ordered. ("Then the circular question is introduced. If something is Ordered completely and completely ordered, then how could it slip to Chaos?")

In my last post I made the point that this statement couldn't be true, as it is the exact opposite of the second law...and it was the second law that you used to get to the completely ordered system in the first place!

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riptide4070

Anyone interested in reading some awesome info from a scientist turned evangelist...go to: drdino.com

Some wonderful arguments may be put to rest!!!

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"the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, was making the world believe he didn't exist" -Kevin Spacey 'The Usual Suspects'

CSflim

heheheh "Creation Science"...the oxymoron to end all oxymorons!

As for the uncollected $250,000 as "proof" that evolution is false, let me try something else.

I will offer my life savings (not quite $250,000...but it's all I've got) if anyone can PROVE to me that the earth rotates around the sun.

Go ahead. Try to prove it.
Oh and don't point me towards all the evidence in supprt of your puny theory (remeber it's just a theory). Evidence supporting your theory does NOT equate to proof.
You can't prove Fermat's theorem by substituting in values for x,y and z now can you? you silly little atheist you!

Anyway, what has Evolution v.s. Creationism got to do with the topic on hand? (Order v.s. Disorder)

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Kyo

Assumptions and perception make up the greater part of 'truth' to a human. Chaos and order, then, are a matter of which assumptions are made and how one is able to perceive.

Some of you seem to utilize math as your gospel. Numbers are representations of quantities we wish to manipulate in a theoretical fashion, within a system whose foundations are assumptions about the nature and accuracy of the representation. I believe it was Godel who theorized that it is impossible to create a self-consistent mathematical system (my wording may be inaccurate). The most popular example of this regards sets: consider set S, which we define to be the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. Does S contain itself? The paradox soon becomes apparent: if we determine that S contains itself, then by definition, it cannot be in set S because S is the set of all sets that do NOT contain themselves. But if S does not contain itself, then it is a member of set S by the same reasoning. This is a wrinkle that Godel proved would exist in any mathematical system.

Other evidence of this is the nature of irrational numbers. Irrational numbers are imperfect representations of physical quantities. Consider a particle's position in space, represented by an ordered triple of irrational numbers. It is obvious that the particle is somewhere, and somewhere exact. Its x-coordinate in a system is not 3.834508... give or take something. It is exactly somewhere. That we cannot represent it exactly is a failing of mathematics in attempting to emulate the real world.

Measurement is a form of mathematics. Whether you are counting the number of sheep in your flock or the thickness in atoms of a tungsten thin film, you are assigning something you see to a number. By doing this, you have introduced the inaccuracy and inconsistency of a human-generated, finite system to something may not necessarily be representable in that fashion. This introduction of error is what I believe introduces the concept of chaos.

My belief, then, is this: the universe is inherently ordered. Some set laws governs the behavior of everything, down to subatomic particles/waves/energy that perhaps we can neither observe nor measure. Even our minds are governed by chemical processes. Thoughts are electro-chemical processes within our minds, and a set of physical laws must govern those processes also.

Consider this: if particle A collides with particle B under some set of conditions, there is a law that governs exactly where those particles will move, at what velocity, acceleration, etc. There is a law that governs what energy is released where, in what form and quantity. If we expand that to include every particle/wave in the universe, it is theoretically possible to have predicted every single event in history from the Big Bang forward.

The situation is fairly synonymous to the modelling of a storm. If we could accurately model every particle in the air, we could theoretically predict with some degree of certainty (determined by the accuracy of measurement/modeling) the path and behavior of the storm.

Chaos, then, is the result of our inherent inability to measure and observe everything down to absolute exactness. Because of this, we are forced into the realm of 'probability', a synonym for uncertainty.

My thoughts, anyway.

CSflim

Determinism is dead.
Randomness is inherrent in the Quantum mechanical viewpoint.
If you take a radioactive atom, there is no law governing as to when it will decay. We can give it a statistical analysis, and declare that the average length of time that such an atom will decay is known (a.k.a. the half-life), so on the large scale we can usually predict things...we can describe evry acurately, the amount of readioation given off by a "lump" of radioactive material, but we cannot predict the activity of a single atom.

Couple this with chaos theory and our ability to predict the future is pretty damn pathetic! (The decay of a single atom in Tokyo could cause a hurricane in Florida?)

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Kyo

You've missed the point of my post, then, though I will admit it is quite a stretch.

To rephrase: It is my belief that laws govern everything and we are simply ignorant of them due to our inability to perceive everything around us to absolute detail.

I'm aware of the case of radioactive decay, but I believe that there is some mechanism, unseen (and perhaps undetectable given our current equipment and methods), that determines the decay of a single atom.

Another way of putting it would be that because we aren't omniscient, we are forced to accept that, to our limited perceptions, some things may always be 'random,' even though, if we could perceive everything to absolute accuracy, we would see that there was some definite mechanism governing supposedly 'random' behavior. You can't tell me for sure that radioactive decay of a single atom is random. You can only tell me that so far as we know and can determine, radioactive decay of a single atom is random.

CSflim

Ah! The hidden variables approach!
Dodgy territory there my friend!

I'm still "agnostic" when it comes to this idea. But ultimately, I feel that it causes more problems than it fixes. It's a lot to give up, just to get away from a little bit of randomness! (Specifically it contradicts relativity, and in a much more severe way than the "trivial" matter of wave function collapse)

But yeah, brownian motion looks random on the macro scale. It requires a deeper level of understanding exactly what constitutes a liquid to explain. That deeper level is atomic theory.
Quantum effects look random on the quantum scale...is this randomness just a consequence of a deeper reality?
Maybe.

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blanks

Great discussion and alot of good ideas.
I break it down a little more simply.
Chaos and order are 2 sides of the same coin. You cant have one without the other. Therefore to answer the original question: the universe is based one both order and chaos. They are not mutually exclusive.