James Gleick, in his book, "Chaos," shows that these processes, apparently chaotic on the surface, have a kind of order at deeper levels.
Gleick tells us how Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist and mathematician, discovered in the early 1960s the first of many mathematical constructs that make up what is now known as chaos theory. Lorenz tried to imagine the unnambly large number of molecules in the atmosphere and the incomprehensibly complex ways in which they must interact. He suspected that it would be impossible to make accurate long-range weather forecasts as a result.
He decided to try to mimic a weather system in a simplified manner with computer graphics. Even this simple model never found a steady state as weather patterns almost, but never quite, repeated themselves.
As a result of the instability shown by this model, Lorenz postulated that the real atmosphere is full of points of instability--areas which could change their state at any time for any reason, affect their neighbors, and possibly affect the entire system. Theoretically, the beating of the wings of a butterfly in Peking could create thunderstorms over New York a month later.
And yet the whole system exhibits an overall pattern of surprising stability. Lorenz's figures, plotted on a graph, showed that the weather follows a line that almost, but never quite, repeats its trajectory. This line is called a Strange Attractor. As the figures are plotted, the resulting line wraps around two or more points in the graph. Unlike an ordinary graph in which points are placed in sequence, any point thus plotted will always show up in the Strange Attractor, but its specific location will always be unpredictable. This curious combination of order and chaos is found everywhere in chaotic systems.
Jupiter is a rather spectacular example. After centuries of scientific conjecture, the Voyager space probes showed that the Great Red Spot is a vast hurricane that has lasted for thousands of years. Voyager photos reveal that the Spot is filled with eddies within eddies of swirling gas, appearing and disappearing over time. But the continued existence of the Spot as a whole is a mystery. Jupiter is a huge ball of chaotic gases, and yet this island of relative stability persists.
Astronomer Philip Marcus programmed a computer with a series of Fluid Equations to model the Jovian weather system. Brightly colored graphics showed the formation of swirls and the beginnings of a large spot made up of smaller eddies. His computer-generated Great Red Spot grew and became stable.
Marcus ran the system again and again, always with the same results. It turned out that the Great Red Spot is a self-organizing system set in motion by the rapid rotation of Jupiter and the strong Coriolis effect which causes eddies to rotate in opposite directions on either side of the equator.
The disorderly behavior of weather systems demonstrates the creative power of chaotic processes. Against all apparent logic, chaos is comprised of orderly complexity--richly organized patterns of stable and unstable areas, finite and infinite complexity normally associated only with living organisms.
Scientists who work on chaos theory find computer graphics to be indispensible for studying the build-up and destruction of chaotic systems. The glowing enhanced colors serve as distinct markers for areas that would be too difficult to track otherwise. Scientists are normally trained to break problems apart and solve them. Graphics give them a real intuitive sense of whole systems by displaying them in living color on the computer screen. So, along with a new scientific theory, chaos researchers may also be providing us with tools that will allow us to learn in truly novel ways.
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, "in Order Out of Chaos," described an experiment on turbulence which gave scientists profound insights into the nature of chaotic systems. A liquid was enclosed in a box. As the box was heated from underneath, the liquid formed long tubes of rising hot material and sinking material that had cooled. When the heat was turned up, the tubes split into four, eight, sixteen--until the system broke down into chaos. But this chaos had a discernable order.
"Indeed, while turbulent motion appears as irregular or chaotic on the macroscopic scale, it is, on the contrary, highly organized on the microscopic scale. The multiple space and time scales involved in turbulence correspond to the coherent behavior of millions and millions of molecules. Viewed in this way, the transition from laminar flow to turbulence is a process of self-organization. Part of the energy of the system, which in laminar flow was in the thermal motion of the molecules, is being transferred to macroscopic organized motion."
Prigogine and Stengers went on to describe the bizarre chemical reactions produced in what is called a Brusselator. Four chemicals are placed in an enclosed container. They react, producing two new chemicals which catalyze the production of each other. As soon as one of the chemicals exceeds a certain concentration, the production of both begins to oscillate regularly. The Brusselator becomes a chemical clock.
"Suppose we have two kinds of molecules, 'red' and 'blue.' Because of the chaotic motion of the molecules, we would expect that at a given moment we would have more red molecules, say, in the left part of a vessel. Then a bit later more blue molecules would appear, and so on. The vessel would appear to us as 'violet,' with occasional irregular flashes of red or blue. However, this is NOT what happens with a chemical clock; here the system is all blue, then it abruptly changes its color to red, and again to blue."
Chemical clocks show an incredible degree of order in what would appear to be random motions of molecules. They work as if they had a way of instantly communicating the total state of the system to each molecule within the system. They have been found everywhere in chemistry. Chemical clocks may provide the underlying order found in organisms--certainly the catalytic effects of enzymes and hormones are similar.