Complexity

We know there's a law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics, that says that disorderliness grows with time. Is there another law of nature that governs how complexity evolves? One that talks about multiple layers of the structures and how they interact with each other? Embarrassingly enough, we don't even know how to define this problem yet. We don't know the right quantitative description for complexity. This is very early days. This is Copernicus, not even Kepler, much less Galileo or Newton. This is guessing at the ways to think about these problems.  

Layers of Reality, Sean Carroll

Image: Rhea in front of Saturn, NASA

Hole stone

Tolmens are the result of a combination of natural forces. Obstacles in fast flowing rivers can create vortices in currents called 'kolks', which can generate enough force to move rocks weighing many tons. On a small scale they gather up gravel and stone and, as they spin and orbit these, can bore holes called 'rock-cut basins' in bigger stones. A basin formed on an overhanging slab, as it might under a waterfall or cascade, can be expend by freeze-thaw erosion that eventually cuts right through, leaving a neat circular hole. These holed rocks are called 'tolmen' from the Cornish for hole ('toll') and stone ('men').

— from Uncommon Ground by Dominick Tyler (2015). More here.

Image: Dominick Tyler

Dune worlds

Domes, Barchan, Barchanoid Ridge, Transverse Ridge, Linear or Longitudinal, Reversing, Star

Sheet, Streak, Shadow, Climbing (and Falling), Echo (Reflection), Lunette, Nebka, Parabolic, Blowout, Compound and Complex

Booming or Singing

— from the contents page of Dune Worlds: How Windblown Sand Shapes Planetary Landscapes by Ralph D. Lorenz, James R. Zimbelman (2014)

Image: Barchan dunes, Hellespontus region of Mars from HiRise. The dunes are about 60 metres across (left to right) and resolution is about 1.5 metres. (Image of whole region here)

Both strange and beautiful

I find [synchrony] beautiful and strange in a way that can only be described as religious. And I know I’m not alone in that reaction. When I read the old accounts by sixteenth century voyagers to Malaysia and Thailand, the first Westerners to witness the astonishing spectacle of fireflies flashing in unison for miles along the riverbanks, I hear in them that same sense of rapture... 

For reasons I wish I understood, the spectacle of synch strikes a chord in us, somewhere deep in our souls. It’s a wonderful and terrifying thing. [Seeing] it touches people at a primal level. Maybe we instinctively understand that if we ever find the source of spontaneous order, we will have discovered the secret of the universe.

from Sync by Steven Strogatz (2003)

There never was more inception than there is now

Emergent phenomena remain elusive — exceedingly difficult to predict from observations of earlier stages. Given hydrogen atoms, a tremendous conceptual leap is required to predict the brilliance of stars or the variety of planets. Given planets, no theoretician alive could predict the emergence of cellular life in all its diversity — nor, given cellular life, could anyone foresee the emergence of consciousness and self-awareness...

We are left, then, to ponder the possible existence of higher orders of emergence — stages of complexity that our brains can no more comprehend than a single neuron can comprehend the collective state of consciousness. Does the universe hold levels of emergence beyond individual consciousness, beyond the collective accomplishment of human societies? Might the cooperative awareness of billions of humans ultimately give rise to new collective phenomena as yet unimagined?

— from Genesis: the Scientific Quest for Life's Origins by Robert Hazen (2005)


The title of the post from Song of Myself  by Walt Whitman (1855)

Image: Two pyramidal neurons by Gregory Dunn (2009). See also works by Ramón y Cajal such as this (1899)

Beyond the rings of Saturn

The hexagon on Saturn is a six-sided hurricane sixty miles deep [and with a circumference that could accommodate] four Earths. It’s ringed by winds of ammonia and hydrogen blowing at 220mph. The storm was seen by the Voyager spacecraft when they passed by in the early 80s. That was the last time until recently that sunlight graced the north pole of Saturn, which takes 30 of our years to make one circuit of the Sun. Soon after the Voyagers departed winter descended. Saturn’s rings tipped away from us, plunging the north pole into fifteen years of darkness. Without sunlight, astronomers were limited to infrared images. They showed the hexagon was still there. But what is it? 

The hexagon is a narrow jet stream that circles the north pole. Researchers think that friction with the clouds on either side of it creates eddies — mini-storms — that push the jet stream into a wave-like shape as it spins around. By spinning water columns at different speeds, scientists have been able to reproduce the six-sided pattern in the lab. In January 2009 the sun began its slow rise in Saturn’s north. Summer was coming. The Cassini spacecraft was there to see it [and passed] right over the storm for a closer look.

— from Storm chasing on Saturn by Dennis Overbye et al.

Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies.

— from a letter by Johannes Kepler to Galileo Galileo written in 1610, cited by Ross Andersen.

Image: NASA

You are a strange loop

Genes are...essential to self-organisation at all the scales of life – just not in a deterministic way. Rather, the genes are needed to make the machines that mediate feedback-driven self-organisation: the self-organisation is a high-level property that emerges from the underlying network, not a feature of any of the individual components.

from The Closed Loop by Jamie A. Davis

Image: Henri Cartier-Bresson

Self-formation

Self-organisation is so mysterious. We still can’t explain why the cells come together to make an eye. There must be more principles that we still don’t understand yet. It’s something that makes me completely in awe of life.

Yoshiki Sasai, quoted by Mo Costandi in an article titled The man who grew eyes


Image: Human embryonic stem cells organise themselves into embryonic eyes when grown in 3D culture. From Nakano, et al. (2012). Yoshiki Sasai/ RIKEN CDB