Order contains disorder

[HydrogenBond]

Much of physics toys with the idea of uncertainty and chaos. But if we look at macro-reality the internal chaos is usually contained by a principle of order. For example, if we start with a cloud of interstellar hydrogen, the amount of disorder is at a maximum. As gravity takes over to form a galaxy, the amount of possible disorder or chaos decreases. It is still there but is reduced by the orderring principle of gravity.

Another example, a single cell, within a nutrient solution, is surrounded by disorder with the liquid and gas that surround itself. It faithfully, reduces the level of disorder by fixing the randon into the stuff it is made of. If all goes well, it produces a daughter cell that now doubles the rate at which disorder is organized.

Even if you look at a forest, the trees may appear to have a random distribution. But even this is orderred. Trees will grow best in those places where sun peaks through the canopy at that point in time. Thousands of viable seeds will be spread, but the existing canopy will order which of these will reach the canopy in 50 years.

An electron in an orbital may still follow the uncertainy principle but the level of uncertainty has decreased relative to a free electron due to the EM force and the formation of the orderred container called the orbital.

For some reason, the existence of disorder and chaos has led to the theory that the formation of life is a relatively unique event. It is assumed that through upteen disorderly random trials and errors something clicked. But another way to look at it, more consitent with macro-reality, is that order is predefined by the laws of nature and that random click, wasn't random at all, but was a natural and logical result of order putting chaos in one of its containers.

[Tormod]

I am not sure I follow. Chaos theory does indeed indentify an order in things. The branches of a tree and the seeds of sunflowers (and many other objects, like the spiral arms of our galaxy) tend to follow a very orderly end predictable (statistically speaking) distribution which tends towards phi, or the golden ratio (although not *exactly* the golden ration, I am not trying to mystify this, it is perhaps a statistical necessity for all I know).

Mario Livio wrote very well about this in his book about phi.

Golden ratio - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Tormod]

Hm...I must have misread your post entirely. M u s t g o t o b e d.

Yes, I agree with you. I do not think life was a one-off event that was completely unlikely to happen. If it were, it was NOT likely to happen. It could equally well be that life is very likely to happen due to the way order imposes itself upon complex things.

The problem is we have only one statistical sample of planets with life, and we know nothing about how life arose here in the first place, so until we find life elsewhere it is bound to be pure speculation.

[InfiniteNow]

Entropy increases, HB. That "order" came from increased disorder somewhere else. How is this social science?

[PsyCho]

There is order within chaos, it appears more or less ordered depending on the scale with which you view it. All your examples of order are also highly disordered (to varying degrees, again relative to observer and scale)... Reality is an illusion oscillating between the two, a bit like a necker cube or paradoxibox.

A related link to this which may interest...

User:Lakinekaki/Bios theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[InfiniteNow]

Originally Posted by InfiniteNow

How is this social science?

Unless maybe this order to which you refer is only a perceptual quaility, and does not relate to the system itself...

[HydrogenBond]

This weird, I was posting this in physics but it ended up in social science. I guess I needed to eat something. Physics has trained our minds to look at nature in terms of chaos and random. This does indeed exist. But ordering principles reduce disorder instead of disorder reducing order, which is what is often taught.

If we look at a crystal there are always some random inclusions making the order less than perfect. But if one considers where the crystal came from, either gas, molten or dissolved, the original disorder was much higher until crystal order took over. When order was done, choas was only a tiny fraction of its original self. Physics blows up that tiny fraction of chaoas and treats it like it is the prime directive. This has biased the way we look at the origins of life. If one assumes order plays second fiddle, you end up with what we have in the way of evolution, which is a rare universal event that nevertheless increases order to the earth.

The trees take random photons, CO2, H20, etc. and fix them into biomass. Humans take the forest of random sized treess and make 2X4's that are assembled together as houses. This allows physicists to sit and ponder why the chaos is so important. That is the product of a choatic instead of an orderred mind.

[PsyCho]

Your ordered mind is built on chaotic processess; regularity producing disease.

Viewed over a long enough time peroid, your mind is certainly not ordered; but tells itself it is to maintain the illusion of control

[Tormod]

Moved to physics.

[BibleBeliever]

Chaos, is this different from Randomness, or a factor of it?
Randomness, is this not more complicated order?

These are genuine questions, there is much to think about if Random is only an illusion due to the fact our limited understanding cannot see the order in it.