Endless Chain of Symmetry

For the first 25 years of my life, I wanted freedom. For the next 25 years, I wanted order. For the next 25 years, I realized order is freedom.- Winston Churchill

Chaos is such a fearsome, romantic, and misunderstood notion. In the 90s, James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science burst into the scene and blew our fuses. Soon, the concepts percolated throughout various fields of knowledge, including the humanities. The notion of Chaos as a science is appealing to the rebellious young intellect, which revels in erratic bouts of extreme behavior. But Chaos theory was not about randomness or disorder; it was about symmetry and order.

There is symmetry in the seemingly random and unthinkable complexity in the apparently predictable. The leafs on a tree. The folds of the brain. A fluffy cloud. A coastline. The motions of the planets. The beating of a heart. A firing neuron. Love making. There is also self-similarity at different levels of magnification. Ontogeny might just recapitulate phylogeny. Chaos theory takes us deeper into the ontologically mind-bending possibility that we are part of a holographic algorithmic fractal evolving not only in the folds of space-time but also in the wrinkles of multiple dimensions.

Summer light fades
Beyond the distant mountains-
The waves are silent