ambivalence

Our propensity to see significance and pattern in coincidence, whether or not there is any real significance there, is part of a general tendency to seek patterns. - Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

I am drawn towards the number 54 and my eyes linger at every instance of this seemingly random and trivial occurrence. Even though the probability is 1 in 100, which translates to quite a high likelihood, I savor and delight in what I perceive to be nature’s constant reminder of unsolved riddles of the universe, where coincidences are just waiting to happen the number of possibilities is infinite. Indeed, I seek comfort in patterns woven into the random tapestry of life, and every instance of 54 seem to indicate that everything will be just fine.

Wired, Issue 16.02

Morality, spirituality, the meaning of life — science doesn’t handle those issues well at all. But that’s cool. We have art and religion for that stuff. Science also assumes predictable cause and effect in a world that’s a chaotic, bubbling stew of randomness. But that’s OK, too. Our approximations are usually good enough. No, the real reason science sucks is that it makes us look bad. It makes us bit players in the Big Story of the universe, and it exposes some key limitations of the human brain.
Look at it this way: Before science, we humans had dominion over Earth, the center of the universe. Now we’re just a bunch of hairless apes on a wet rock orbiting a minor star in a marginal galaxy.
Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can’t really embrace it. Science describes the world with numbers (ratio of circumference to diameter: pi) and abstractions (particles! waves! particles!). But our intractable brains evolved on a diet of campfire tales. Fantastical explanations (angry gods hurling lightning bolts) and rare events with dramatic outcomes (saber-toothed tiger attacks) make more of an impact on us than statistical norms. Evolution gave us brains that crave certainty, with irrational fears of crashing in an airplane and a built-in weakness for just-so stories about intelligent design. Meanwhile, the true wonders revealed by the scientific method — species that change into new species over time, continents that float around the planet, a quantum-mechanical world where nothing is for sure — are worse than counterintuitive. To a depressingly large number of us, they’re downright threatening.
In other words, thanks to evolution, half of all Americans don’t believe in evolution. That’s the universe for you: impersonal, uncaring, and ironic.

I came across an article on Wired magazine (16.01) titled The Software That Will Take Digital F/X to the Next Level of Awesome, relaying how Jos Stam, a computer scientist specializing in 3-D graphics who loves complex problems, view “reality [as] a binary riddle to be cracked, a series of fleeting images best appreciated after they’ve been rendered into 1s and 0s”. He has already devised an algorithm that models digital smoke with astounding realism (used in Lord of the Rings and War of the Worlds) and is currently working on daunting problems involving the interactions of objects and forces, which if successful would be “the holy grail of computer animation”. He wants “software that can play God with pixels”.

The article certainly affirms my belief that nature is innately governed by mathematics, as there seems to be mathematics and numbers in every aspects of the world, think golden ratio which is embedded in arts and nature. I am ceaselessly fascinated by the fact that nature can be accurately modeled by the complex dynamics of mathematics, attempting for example to mimic how elements interact in the real world at a fundamental level such as smoke with wind or solid objects with fabrics.

Paul Dirac, a Nobel Laureate in Physics in 1933, said that “one could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better”.

We may wonder, for example, why all the phenomena encompassed by electromagnetism, from the behavior of electrons to the nature of light, can be explained by a set of four differential equations known as Maxwell’s equations. Equally puzzling is the fact that some geometrical curves like the ellipse, invented/discovered by the Greek mathematician Menaechmus around 350 BC, were found 2,000 years later to describe the orbits of planets around the Sun. Similarly, group theory proved to be essential in the understanding of both the organization of elementary (subatomic) particles, and the structure of solids. What is it that makes mathematics fit the observable universe like a glove?

- Mario Livio, author of The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi

Sometimes I marvel at the orderliness of our universe. The sun and moon in their uninterrupted cycle of day and night assure us of a new dawn and providing us a closure for today. The seasonal changes endow us with an excitement of a new cycle of beginnings and ends. A cascade of stars that glisten in the heavens imbues us with the mystery of our existence. And then, there’s the Physics and Mathematical laws that govern the realms of reality, that is the very fundamental cause for our existence. Life might not even be possible without gravity to begin with. Nature signs on its creations with the Golden ratio , which permeates the foundations of our observable environment.

The orderliness of the universe fascinates me as much as when I observed the locals in Japan standing on the left side of the escalator, all cases without exceptions. The proof to that is I still recall it so vividly even after 5 years. Order in society…something we cannot do without, although I’d say that with the case of the escalator, that would make us quite a rigid and inflexible bunch.

Beneath this seemingly pristine facade lies an intricate web of complexity, woven into the very blueprint of our existence.

And of course , underneath it all is the orderliness of my own life, which I sometimes describe as mundane and routine, except with the unpredictable occasional changes which soon enough become inevitably prosaic. I crave for order, the safety net I can fall back to, especially when life gets a little too messy for my liking.

For the first time, I am encountering a broken water heater at my apartment. Before that is replaced, the apartment manager suggested we use Apt 411’s bathroom, since it’s still vacant. Now that is definitely not a common occurrence in my ordinal life, is it? Tomorrow morning I’ll feel a wave of freshness sweep over me as I waltz into the vacant Apt 411 just to use the shower.