The Book: Chaos - Making a New Science
My training is in engineering and on day 1 they said “we are going to change the way you think” and they did.
Engineering was a HUGE change to how I see the world, and this book is the second. It brought me a completely different perspective. It brought the complexity to life!
This book introduced me to non-linear thinking. The idea that a system can go along in a cycle with slight variations, and then shoot off in some completely different direction. All completely normal and explainable.
This kind of behavior is where a “mechanical world” can become completely unpredictable. The Universe is creative via non-linear systems and the vast majority of systems in the world are non-linear!
I highly recommend reading the book, as it covers much more than I discuss here, and it is all fascinating. Other topics addressed include Fractals, the Mandelbrot set, and more. The book can be found on amazon here: https://www.amazon.ca/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453
Before reading Chaos, I had a very mechanistic approach to the world. I thought that if we could just understand and measure everything we could predict the world! This book broke that notion for good and a whole new world opened up for me.
Chaos - The Lorenz Water Wheel
I had to build it...
As I read along, I learned about non-linear behavior and was very curious. When I turned page 26 and first saw this picture, I had an immediate response that I had to build it.
My son and I took an old bicycle rim and lashed 12 plastic cups with little holes in the bottom onto it and then hooked a hose on top to drip into it, and we had a working Lorenz water wheel in our front yard. In 1998, taking pictures was not the thing, so I have no pictures or video of it, unfortunately. It was hilarious to watch and then to watch people walking by watch it.
But after watching the water wheel, for a while, I wondered what it would be like with more cups. And then I realized that I am a software engineer and I could build it in software. Duh! So I did.
Your Lorenz Water Wheel Toy!
I have provided the code in the links below. If you want to try it, you can download the free Apache NetBeans Integrated Development Environment, rename the files to end in .java, not txt and click run. You do not need to know java at all. Just load and go.
When you run the java app, it displays two panels, one to show the water wheel, and one to set the parameters. I tried to make everything a variable through the parameter panel. Click the “Trace Center of Mass” to get the image like in the video below. Adding that option created a lot of interesting behavior.
The code is very crude, as this was my first java program. The interface has one panel with all the parameters to set, and another panel that has the display. The video below shows it in action:
A typical sequence would be to click the start button and watch for a bit, then hit Pause, change some parameters, then hit apply values and restart the wheel.
I have had a song in my head from Bob Moses that I was listening to when I recorded the video. A fabulous song called “Seen it Coming” that has been my go to music that has been driving me. Little did I know that the sound went on the video! So I am trying to figure out how to get him to make money form having the song on the video. I am still working on it…
One of the things I did was to run the wheel overnight with the trace center of mass turned on with Trace dot size of 100 or larger. It made an interesting display. I thought that there would be some areas of the wheel that would not be covered in 8 hours of running it. Nope. It covered the entire space. That was then it really hit me that chaos is a source of creativity in the Universe. It can go anywhere and do anything. Instability is creative.