Eric Idle, a member of the comedy troupe Monty Python, and John Major, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, both turn 70 years old today. On the occasions of their mutual birthday 20 years ago, Idle wrote to Major to convey his compliments. Say no more, say no more.
If only Idle's speculation was true, then at last the Ministry of Silly Walks would get the funding it deserves.
-via Letters of Note
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It seems he's answering the 'why' and not the 'what'.
"your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight"
Yes, pretty much any chaotic influence on an orderly system will induce chaos in that system. But chaos is somewhat of a copout - it's a catch-all for patterns or interactions too complex to model or predict, but that doesn't make chaotic systems fundamentally different from ordered ones since the only distinction is whether or not us humans can understand and make accurate predictions. A bullet fired in space and a bullet fired on the earth only differ in the degree to which the environment affects the predictability of the bullets trajectory. But they're still just bullets traversing a distance according to fixed laws.
"the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder."
This makes almost no sense, since if nature wanted to maximize disorder, physics would be inconsistent. Stable gravity is a huge help in creating ordered systems - what if gravity flipped erratically? or if time wasn't sequential? it seems to me there's no end to the kinds of things nature could do to maximize disorder that it defiantly isn't doing.
Be that as it may, even the seemingly random orbits of electrons can't be truly random, they're just determined by influences that we have no way of measuring, because even though they appear chaotic, they're *consistently* chaotic, which implies that they aren't chaotic at all since as a phenomenon all electron orbits resemble each other. That implies there are rules at play.
A dice throw isn't really random or chaotic, it only appears to be - if one had enough information about the initial state of the throw one could determine the result before it happened. Because as humans we do not yet possess the means to extract that information we call it random or chaotic.
Even the whole issue of interference of a system caused by merely measuring it is dependent on the technology we use to measure things. We know no better way to measure the velocity of an atom than to bounce a photon off it, and maybe there IS no better way, but in either case it's an engineering problem, not an indication that randomness exists.
By the way, electrons don't have orbits - they have wave functions (which is a fancy way of saying that you can only predict the probability of finding an electron at a given point in space away from the atom's nucleus).
Quantum physics is unreal. I don't know anyone who can say that they truly understand it (including myself).
string theory really is pretty weak these days
at first it was at least beautiful and interesting
but with it's ever increasing accolades who now seem to find their baseless equations a reasonable grounds on which to try and degrade the most respected and established scientific theories in history
i might suggest that people move on to a more fruitful field of scientific inquiry
Any order we perceive is really misunderstood chaos.
May I have a grant now?
That's a heavy thing to say.