Professor Joseph Faber spent 25 years perfecting his “talking machine,” which he called the Euphonia. He unveiled the Euphonia in 1846 at London's grand Egyptian Hall before a crowd of people who paid a shilling each to see it. The contraption was essentially a keyboard and bellows attached to a automaton of a woman’s face.
Fourteen piano keys controlled the articulation of the Euphonia's jaw, lips, and tongue while the roles of the lungs and larynx were performed by a bellows and an ivory reed. The operator could adjust the pitch and accent of the Euphonia's speech by turning a small screw or inserting a tube into its nose. It was reported that it took Faber seven long years simply to get his machine to correctly pronounce the letter e.
But she pronounced more than that, as the Euphonia held conversations with the crowd, slowly but understandably. It was certainly a technological wonder, but people were put off by the creepiness of the face that spoke -a view of the uncanny valley. The machine might have been a sensation without the face, but it was not to be. Read the story of Faber and his Euphonia at Atlas Obscura.
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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.