Nature's Chaos by James Gleick & James Gleick

Author:James Gleick & James Gleick [PORTER, ELIOT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT000000
ISBN: 9780759521186
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Surf, Buccaneer Cove, Galápagos Islands, 9 May 1966

Surf, Buccaneer Cove, Galápagos Islands, 9 May 1966

Lava flow, Sullivan Bay, James Island, Galápagos Islands, 10 March 1966

Structure implies history. History infiltrates and inspires any solid form, even one as seemingly shapeless and ephemeral as an assortment of grasses strewn like pickup sticks on a meadow’s floor. The past of a rock wall—the stable and unstable flows, the crystallization and the pressure that shaped it—reverberates in its visible layers and cracks. Gnarled shoulders of black lava reveal one sort of past. Other sorts may be harder to read: the history of dynamical and chemical changes in molten rock that lead one mineral to condense, another to crystallize.

Part of the movement toward understanding chaos has been an appreciation of pattern formation as a specialty in its own right. The laws of pattern formation seem to govern snowflakes as well as microscopic crystals in’ metal alloys, the banding of underground gneiss as well as the slow diffusion of lichen across a rock surface. Theoretical physicists are analyzing the delicate tension between order and disorder that creates such structures. There is a hierarchy of patterns, from small to large, that seems equally familiar to those studying the organization of computer networks or human societies. “All structures (whether of atoms, cells, philosophies, or societies) began from something that was without form and void,” Cyril Stanley Smith, a metallurgist and an expert on structure, has said. “A nucleus of a definite structure somehow formed somewhere, and if it was a structure more desirable than chaos, it then proceeded to grow at the expense of chaos. . . .”

A snowflake begins with a nucleus. A seed of ice imposes its order on the molecules nearby. Crystallization requires molecules to snap into alignment, forming the rows and facets along which a solid may later cleave. The substance communicates its order not just over the short range, neighbor influencing neighbor, but over long distances, almost mysteriously, creating patterns that echo one another on scales of hundreds or millions of atoms. Defects and misalignments break up the simple geometry. Ice crystals grow as dendrites, swordlike structures, the points branching and forming new needles. A complex shape arises out of a featureless void. If a sixfold symmetry becomes visible to the naked eye, the water molecule has imposed a simple order on the whole. But the perfectly symmetrical snowflake of the standard rendering—of the schoolroom paper cutout or the textbook illustration—occurs rarely in nature.

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