Search This Blog

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Chaos - The Only Order ?

Best Blog Tips
Growing up is never easy, especially when everything else in the world is growing with you in quantity, quality and in almost every possible dimension. Lets take look at some statistics -

Estimated Number of registered websites in the world-
1998- 2.4 million
2000- 7 million
2010-180 million

Question - did anyone in the year 1998/99/2000 imagined that the number of registered websites will increase 25 times over next decade ?
Question 2-any guesses for the number of registered websites by 2020? 500 million or 5 billion?

Estimated World Population-
1000- 0.25 billion
1500 - 0.50 billion
1810- 1 billion
1910 - 1.8 billion
1965-3.6 billion
2000 - 6.1 billion
2010-6.9 billion
2020 - projected - 8 billion

Question - did anyone in the year 1000 AD imagined that the world population will shoot up 25 times in next 1000 years ?
Question 2 - any guesses for the population in 3010-150 billion? OR back to 0.25 billion?

Estimated Mobile users in the world -
2000- 0.5 billion
2005- 2.1 billion
2010 - 5 billion

Question- did anyone in the year 2000 forecast a 10 fold increase in next 10 years?
Question 2 - projections for 2020? definitely not 40 or even 20 billion right !!

Year 1910 - did Britishers ever imagined that 100 years fast forward and Indian and Chinese economies will be ruling the world, despite of them looting the world for 300 years !!

Will United Nations/US/UK government will ever succeed in reducing the Chaos/Entropy of this World, i.e reducing the poverty, wars, coup, terrorism etc?

These might be sample and apparently random statistics over a completely diverse time frame and on similar lines we can analyze the number of TV sets from 1900 to 1930 to 1950 to 2000 and many more interesting statistics. But the question remains - is it possible to predict any trend over a 'long time frame' in future for almost anything/event/behaviour!

Perhaps not! Why? Simply because the human mind does not have the ability to comprehend the outcomes of billions and billions of macro and micro events taking place everyday, everywhere, everytime ! No matter how smart we become in foreseeable future, we wont be able to run aMonte Carlo simulation for the whole world in our head to predict the outcomes of random events.

With world becoming more complex then ever, with the advent of internet and social media, the possibilities of interactions and so the total volume of interactions has grown out of proportion in the past decade. So, the definition of 'long time frame' itself has reduced and most analysts are caught on the wrong side, in their attempt to predict the stock price over next 6-12 months!!
So, is Chaos the only order? With increasing population and more rapidly increasing 'things' (mobile, internet!!) around human beings, the number of interactions between man-man, man-thing, thing-thing are bound to increase in leaps and bounces which will further increase even more random events in almost any field - science, technology, politics over next 10 years !! So perhaps the next decade be most eventful decade in past 20000 years? I think so, provided some comet/s (force majeure as they call in business :)) etc does not happen to our dear planet!

What about Religion? Almost 80% of the world population firmly believes in some religion or the other, still the number of people attaining salvation/ moksha, which tend to reduce the Chaos/ Entropy of the world have not succeeded either? But what if no religion ever came into existence, perhaps we would still be in jungles! So religions have definitely succeeded in temporarily reducing the randomness, aberrations in the society at large.

We can find the most interesting application of Chaos Theory in - Politics!! Politicians know that its impossible to predict the behaviour of voters after 4/5 years, i.e during next elections. So, they start their hidden and public campaign to woo voters just few months/ weeks before the elections!! Perhaps we need to establish a new branch of studies - Thermodynamics of Politics and Religion!!

But the next question is to all "Thermodynamicists" (please don't mind the extension of Science- Scientists association, if you prefer Mathematics - Mathematician kind of usage then I can rewrite "it" as Thermodynamicians but it does sound weired, right!), so coming back to question outside the brackets of terminology, Can the Entropy and so Chaos of our System will keep on increasing forever from here on or will the end be same as the beginning- A Big Blast?

Chaos - The only order, from ever since, forever !

4 comments:

  1. I started writing this post thinking about the random events in Tunisia, Lebanon, unfortunate floods in Australia, Brazil, Wikileaks and India's one run victory over SA couple of days ago and by the time I completed this post, I learnt the India won unexpectedly again by 2 wickets in today's match and unfortunately a 7.4 scale earthquake strikes in Pakistan and parts of North India !! Hoping for some randomly good and positive events to happen in 2011 !! World Peace and harmony can randomly prevails for few years at least for once in human lifetimes for the sake of Chaos ?!? And that's why I respect all those visionaries and leaders who are fighting this chaos in their own ways, perhaps in their families, cities, countries and societies at large and I sincerely do hope All of them succeed for once, for a change, forever !!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. If its the question about the end - my theory (though I am by no means an astrophysicist, not "astrophysician" :p ) is:
    1. Big bang started it. What was before the big bang. We will NEVER know. Jump to the end to know why.
    2. Cluster, galaxies, stars, planets formed.
    3. Certain combinations of elements formed compounds, certain compounds formed structures that can hold information and can recognize it later.
    4. These suitable molecular structure "evolved" into living beings. (BTW what exactly is life?).
    5. Anyway, back to the cosmos level. Stars spend their fuels. Some become dwarfs, some black holes.
    6. Black holes ultimately gulp down everything in the vicinity.
    7. The matter that goes INTO the black hole loses all the past information.
    9. If we could perhaps have a vision to SEE the black hole. One side is a mere point in space that eats up everything. The other side is a mere point in space that is infinitesimally compressed and organized with the matter and energy. Doesn't this look familiar to the big bang?
    10. So a new universe starts inside the black hole that we currently see as a mere speck. (with perhaps different sets of physical constants, or even more fantastic - different sets of physical laws)

    Which means that our current universe is an outcome of a black hole in some other universe.
    The creatures of some other universe would not be able to see us (and even if they could, they wouldn't comprehend our side of universe).

    They would believe that its just a black hole.
    But we on this side, have our own universe inside that "infinitesimally small speck".

    What this means?
    This could continue forever without violating the thermodynamics.

    Now coming to the humans. Same thing.
    We evolved out of some primitive creature.
    We have grown (possibly out of proportion and control). We will plunder the earth, so much that we will make it unfavorable for our living!

    Soon a new creature evolved (from us? from some other living being?) will take over the reigns of this earth.

    On a smaller time scale - rules, regulation, codes, conducts etc are constraints placed to fight the 2nd law of thermodynamics (as applicable to living creatures and bio-social setting).
    But you can't fight the nature!

    ReplyDelete
  3. reminds me of scene from movie - Man in Black in which a black cat is shown wearing a pendant and guess what, the pendant contains an entire galaxy :) !!

    applying the same law, we are today because of a series of highly unlikely low probability events taking place one after the other for millions of year, so I feel the probability of life anywhere (including earth) if we twist even one of the millions of events will be very low.

    ReplyDelete
  4. LOL - the Orion's belt!

    But what is life?
    When do you label an entity - alive.

    :)

    ReplyDelete

Appreciate your views, feedback, criticism....