Moving deeper past the surface layers

Flow,

I appreciate the book recommendations. I've got to be careful because I can easily get in over my head on this stuff. I don't have any scientific training. I'm a blue collar guy with a high school education. I started trying to understand post-modernism, but I gotta say that it's really, really difficult for me. This isn't self-deigration, I'm just being honest.

I read The Holographic Universe probably ten years or so ago, and another book titled Stalking the Wild Pendulum (I don't recall the author). This was follow on reading from an interest that was stirred up after I read The Dancing Wu Li Masters. I recently read The Self-Conscious Universe, by Amit Goswami.

What is Chaos Theory? Can you give me a layman's thumbnail sketch? I've thought for a while that the idea of an ordered universe didn't make sense. I don't know if that has anything to do with it.

Chris
 
It is a philosophical approach based upon scientific observations that teaches that there is always hidden order which is self-organizing, self-emergent, and self-referential; and, which emerges from periods of chaos, or transformation in matter. This appears to be a basic, if not the basic, law for the ways in which nature operates.

The popular example used most often is to describe the phase transitions that occur as water moves from gaseous form, to liquid form, to solid form; or, steam to water to ice. Of course temperature gradients influence the movements between phases, but patterns of molecular movements within the materials being studied show consistencies that appear when, for instance, the same things happen with other elements and compounds. In other words there are reference points and forms observed that show similarity and consistency across the entire spectrum of materials that are observed during phase transitions; and, they are consistently similar whether or not the materials are organic or inorganic. One of these forms is the spiral or gyre, which is also one of the most widely used sacred symbols used by ancient cultures in religious and/or artistic expression.

Be careful because you may become as hooked on this stuff as I was. And about the blue collar stuff ? Forget that. From what you've said you could probably hold you own pretty well in discussions with most professors I've known. Besides the joke at the university where I worked in administration was that a PhD. degree only meant that the person that had one knew more and more about less and less.

But really, most of them were pretty smart people, and very nice also. The jobs I held for a while required a master's and preferred a PhD., but I didn't even complete my bachelor's requirements. I grew up in a blue-collar factory town near Chicago, but fell into the university work by being in the right places at the right times with the best answers. That can still happen sometimes, even in these distorted times.

Oh, another thing I would suggets that you do is to buy a copy of the NY Times and read the Science Times section every tuesday, religiously. Over time you'll pick up more scientific knowledge than you can imagine.

flow....:)
 
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