The fascinating aspects of chaos.

I must immediately volunteer the fact that the thrust of this article is the result of a programme that we watched last Thursday night.  It was a programme originally featured on the UK BBC 4 channel in 2008.  Called High Anxieties, The Mathematics of Chaos, it is a fascinating examination into the way that mathematicians have fundamentally adjusted their views, from the certainty of Newtonian principles to the certain uncertainty offered by mathematicians such as Henri Poincare and Alexander Lyapunov.  The 60-minute documentary, directed by David Malone, is wonderfully interesting and much more relevant to the uncertainty surrounding all our lives than one might anticipate from any references to mathematicians!  It puts the collapse of Lehman Brothers, some 2 years ago, last Thursday, into an interesting perspective.

Here’s the first 9 minutes as offered on YouTube, introduced thus,

David Malone http://golemxiv-credo.blogspot.com author of The Debt Generation, directs and presents this film, It is the first part of a documentary first shown on BBC4 Television in the UK in September 2008. The film was first broadcast 2 days after the collapse of Lehman brothers at the start of the financial crisis. It looks at the discoveries in mathematics during the 20th Century which have challenged the view that the world is an essentially knowable and therefore controllable place. The film focuses on the economy and the environment and suggests that ideas about unpredictability, the butterfly effect and tipping points, stemming from mathematics, are part of what underlie some modern anxieties about the world we live in.

If this first part grabs your attention then finding the other 8 parts is easy on YouTube.  Alternatively, the complete set of videos is linked together as one film on Top Documentary Films, click  High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos. where it is described as follows,

The documentary looks at the modern advances in mathematics and how they affect our understanding of physics, economics, environmental issues and human psychology.

The film looks at how developments in 20th Century mathematics have affected our view of the world, and particularly how the financial economy and earth’s environment are now seen as inherently unpredictable.

The film looks at the influence the work of Henri Poincare and Alexander Lyapunov had on later developments in mathematics. It includes interviews with David Ruelle, about chaos theory and turbulence, the economist Paul Ormerod about the unpredictability of economic systems, and James Lovelock the founder of Gaia theory about climate change and tipping points in the environment.

As we approach tipping points in both the economy and the climate, the film examines the mathematics we have been reluctant to face up to and asks if, even now, we would rather bury our heads in the sand rather than face harsh truths.

Very, very interesting and rather puts the pictures of the Petermann Glacier shown here into context.