Physics wk 6 - Chaos Theory

I think ordered chaos is depending upon ones viewpoint.  An outside observer looking at my living room could describe it as chaotic.  There are piles of books, papers, pens, shoes, acupuncture equipment, personal effects seemingly strewn about.  However I know where my Tuesday classes books are related to my Thursday class books.  And I can locate everything within  seconds.  To me, because I have created the space there is an order to it.  If, my girlfriend were to be ever so helpful and tidy up the front room these view points would become reversed.  The space could appear tidy and all items squared up and organized and yet to me it would be chaos and I would take a long time to find an item I was searching for. 

This leads me to think about the differences in the organization of public vs private spaces.  In my private space it only matters if I know how to navigate it, where in a public space the organization and navigation of the space needs to be relatively easy for the majority to understand or Inuit.  Like the duodecimal system at a library.

 Franctals are a physical representation of a system, they allow us to visualize patterns that appear in complex numerical systems.  I find the way that the smallest piece of a fractal is representational of the whole to be fascinating.  Take the cauliflower in the image.  Each tiny cone looks like the large cone that each of the smaller ones combine to make.  It pleases me that there are visual representations of fractals because I lack the mathematical knowledge to understand the complex systems that they represent.

The article that we read on the consciousness of chaos took me a while to comprehend.  I initially could not see where the chaos theory crossed paths with the state of consciousness, depression specifically in the article, that was being discussed.  But then I understood, by comparison to the images of fractals.  A depressed consciousness will have depressed behaviors that lead to the continuation of that state.  Just as every section of the fractal has the same shape as the whole and the summation of those similar parts create the whole.  We see the same concept of chaos can play itself out in very different aspects of nature.