Hi guys, I finally managed to upload a few videos and start a vlog on my topic. My channel s here: http://www.youtube.com/user/UnlockingTheUniverse
Latest
Proposal
I’ve completed steps 1-3 in my project proposal, and I am reflecting on 4 and 5.
Sandcastles
BBC 2 has a YouTube clip that utilizes sandcastles as an example to explain entropy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQSoaiubuA0&list=SPDE65D78966FEC465
Genius
I wonder what Jobs would have thought of entropy.
With his drive for perfection and the ideal design, would he have accepted the idea that no matter how great his products were, they, too, would have to bend to the rules of chaos and break down eventually? Or would he have fought it? The juxtaposition of what we know to be true of matter, and what Jobs strove for is quite interesting.
And, of course, this prompts another question of the more general sort: Why do we strive to be perfect, even though we know it is both unachievable, and, even if it were, when we know that perfection would begin to destroy itself immediately after creation?
Chaos and Entropy
An MIT student’s paper on Chaos theory and Entropy.
Dual Research
I’ve been looking into chaos and whatnot for the past few weeks, and I’m starting to wonder if it’s the right topic for me. I don’t understand some of the concepts that are involved in it, and it’s pretty frustrating to be at a dead end. However, I’ve been thinking about multidimensional space (as in 3-dimensional, 4-dimensional, etc.) and I think I’ll start looking into that on the side while I try to also get a better grasp on chaos.
Expansion
So I’ve been pondering my topic for a while, and I’m considering expanding into Chaos Theory rather than just Butterfly Effect. Ever since I’ve started researching the idea as a whole, I’ve been interested in other parts of the Theory. I’m probably going to pursue that rather than the narrower idea of Butterfly Effect.
Chaos Theory
BBC did a program on this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pv1c3 I can’t get it here at school, but I’m hoping I can watch it at home.
Pi is a number…or is it?
This blew my mind.
“Randomness
Generating random numbers is somewhat of a sport among mathematicians. Because how does oneprogram randomness? There’s no way! And so they cheat. They take some kind of infinite number sequence (like the number pi) and tell a computer to select decimals at certain intervals (like every fourth digit, or seventh, or whatever). Pi is a number without inner structure and its digits are random (for as far as we know now), so out comes a random number sequence. But! this is not real randomness because any other smart computer could analyze the result and blow the whistle: This is not random random, this is pi random. And as the secret is out, the rest of the pseudo-random sequence can be predicted. If the second computer divides every outcome of the first by the way it generates the pseudo-random sequence, it would spew out 1 every cycle. That violates the prime definition of randomness, and the sequence is not random. True randomness can not be divided by something other than itself.
And besides that, the decimals of the number pi go on forever. That means that if we try to express the relationship between diameter and circumference of a circle in numbers we need infinite detail to stay truthful. But infinite detail does not exist, and so we must yield to the rather shocking conclusion that the before mentioned relationship can not be expressed in numbers, and that pi is not a number at all!
The same goes for that other famous ‘number’ e, and all so-called transcendental numbers (numbers that go on forever after the dot; in other words, numbers that represent infinite detail). And to make matters worse, transcendental numbers out-number real numbers with an infinite factor.
It may seem a bit paradoxical but since mathematics can not release its detailed accuracy, it loses connection with the real world around quantum level.”
http://www.abarim-publications.com/SelfSimilarity.html#.UV2re6KceSp
Chaos 