Week 7 (emergence)

I chose to read about synchronization for the paper and presentation. Although most of the titles looked intriguing, Strogatz's book popped out at me. I've always been fascinated by synchronization in nature and in engineering. I think that everyone is at some level and I often wonder why. We're drawn to it. We find harmony in singing appealing, we like organized dances, we even clap in unison sometimes. And even though it isn't true, people like to perpetuate the old wives' tale that crime spikes around the full moon. Why is synchronization so pleasing? Why does it occur so often in inanimate and unthinking things?

And why is math the underlying tie in all of this? Even when I was much younger I intuitively understood that the world around me could be modelled mathematically, that the answer to how so many things in the world works could be solved in mathematical terms. Granted, I'm not too advanced in math and I doubt I ever will be. But it's easy to let one's mind wonder, to think of the possibilities. As I said before, it's very pleasing on an intuitive level. It reminds me of the philosopher Spencer and how he said that everything is guided by rhythms. Even though I thought his conclusions were flawed (i.e. that one day the rhythms behind the universe would slow down and blinker out) that idea of a world based on rhythms and synchrony delighted me.

Although I couldn't go through all of the details that Strogatz pours out in his book, I learned so much from it. From chaos theory to pulse-coupled oscillators to complexity theory to Josephson junctions to network theory to quantum mechanics to mathematical biology, he drew connections that I hadn't been able to articulate before. That's what I enjoyed most about my book, I think. Today, we're constantly searching for connectedness. We need to organize our thoughts and put all of these complex networks in our lives into perspective. This book makes many of those connections more clear.