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Understanding Humans

AuthorHouse

Contents

Chapter One

It's easy to think that "to look is to see". That to open one's eyes, and take in the universe, be it unsuspecting or otherwise, is simple. That to hear, and listen, and "sense" it, is to have sense about it.

Humans have long recognized that there was something weird about their world, and this impression persists. Elders, around long enough to see and believe, relayed this info to their progeny. They wrote it out on cave walls, and built grand structures to show the world and whomever it may concern that, yes, they too thought there was more there than was meeting their eye.

In school, you can study "science", and practice its "method" to better understand what it really is you are seeing and experiencing. You can learn about the fabulously consequential achievements of some of your ancestors who were particularly attentive observers. Soon, you too will begin to notice that, whatever and wherever it is we are living, it's a real, real complicated thing, and that's for sure.

We are now realizing that the great discoveries of Einstein, Newton, and all the other "Plancks" they stood on, were parts of a paradigm that was, in fact, all of these things together, connected in a vastly complex "multi-level universe". The name of the model is "Chaos Theory".

That term, Chaos, means to say this: that in all systems, no matter how chaotic and random things appear to be, there is always organization to be found. Always. Everywhere. Period. That, according to "Chaos", there is no such thing as chaos. Perhaps you need to look harder, but somehow or another it all makes sense.

Born late in the last century, from the observations and evaluations of a diverse group (sociologists, climatologists, biologists, economists, mathematicians), it is a concept known by another name, as "Complexity Theory", which made the cover of TIME around 1992. Though not technically synonymous, "Complexity Theory" and "Chaos Theory" are talking about this same broad paradigm, or explanation, for what it is we are living and awake to. It is widely considered among the great discoveries of that 100 years of human advancement.

Hence, to be hip to it all, the older term has been preferred by many, such that when waxing philosophical one alludes to it as, simply, "Chaos".

Critical to the development of this model are the mathematicians. It is their formulas and number magic, especially when coupled with the amazing speed of modern computers, that have opened our eyes to how so much of the previously unexplainable can, well, be explained. Alas, we've seen already as students of physics and chemistry that "it always comes down to math" on the most basic levels. Now we're wanting to say the same is true of chaos. Er, Chaos.

This matters to humans. Their instincts as survivor freaks mandate that they learn and know as much as they possibly can. So we start this venture, of trying to understand these "folks", humans, here at the beginning, in Chapter One, by trying to understand what is "going on" in the universe in the first place. This thing called livin', a happening we call "Chaos".

The Fractal

Very basically, it is "the fractal" that is the focus of the Chaos Theory Model. A fractal can be considered to represent any "thing" that has mass and therefore form. That is, every "thing". So, trees and people and everyday objects, as well as "things" like cultures and cities, countries, worlds. Teams. Bands. Armies. In the sea and in the atmosphere, groups of gases and water that collectively act as a "thing" show us again how "things" want to aggregate somehow and form, together, a "thing". We call these units-of-anything "fractals", and the anything they are or become a component of, it's "a fractal" too.

Since all things are so positively unique, we use this term that means "unique geometrical object", or "fractal". That term, fractal, was coined by a German scientist by the name of Mandelbrot, who was making them by plugging mathematical equations into his computer. He showed that if you print this on an X/Y graph, the screen soon would "paint" out some very familiar objects we see in everyday life. He called them "fractals". They are actually sets of numbers, generated by this equation, and are also referred to as Mandelbrot Sets.

So why? How can a mathematical equation be connected to something so abstract as living and non-living objects? Is our existence, and the existence of any fractal, somehow driven and locomoted by a kind of mathematical engine?

In this universe that so baffles us, we should try to look at it and see fractals, and employ all our smarts and insights to explore the deep complexities in even the simplest of "things".

Do The Math

When we studied The Calculus in college my teacher, a lefty, said on the first day of class that people have told him often that the course changed their life in some way. It's true of major math. There's a certain messing with the mind that goes on, an enlightened perspective somehow. It lets you notice it's a pretty nutty universe out there. Or out here, rather.

OK. Let's say I throw my pen at the wall. Now, I can always calculate the thing a certain distance from that wall. It gets half-way there, then half of that, and half of that, and so on, and I can always make that number smaller. So, theoretically, the thing never gets there, but I see it smack the wall, so something's wrong with my theory.

We see that, at the extremes of things, simple laws of math and physics seem to "break down", and no longer apply to the situation. Such "never really get there" asymptotes keep wanting to occur at these extremes. What are they approaching?

Einstein showed it was true of Newtonian Physics. For example, according to the math of relativity, we know we can't speed up a particle too much because, at the speed of light, theoretically, it would weigh an infinite amount. Modern scientists have managed to prove through grand experimentation that the math is for real, that length contracts and time dilates, just as Einstein said. And those particles, barreling down those accelerators, really do get heavier.

We see the oddities of math in numbers like primes, in how they are somehow the building blocks of numbers, even though integers seem so countable as to be accountable. Yet we keep seeing indications that all numbers are not created equal. Can this be?

We've seen a handful of constants that are associated with so many basic things. Pi, Fibonacci's number, Planck's constant, the Ideal Gas Law constant. Bernoulli"s constant. What do they mean? Where are they coming from? What about Mandelbrot Sets, and the constant that is in that equation? Are they these numbers?

And consider "1". The "unit circle", with a radius of one, generates the fancy math of trigonometry, based on all that "1" is, and isn't. Waves and circles and cycles, all somewhere in that vast ever and neverland, between zero and "1". When it comes to math, there is no number so significant as "1". (And don't forget that zero, itself, had to be discovered, by the ancient Greeks.)

A fractal is "1" thing, and therefore we must wonder if everything that applies to 1 can somehow apply to the this unit, the fractal. Halved and subdivided in potentially...