Before continuing the last Nugget, there is a book I would
like to share. During my college days,
there was a new book published that changed my understanding of chaos. The book was called “Chaos: Making a New
Science” by James Gleick. It dealt with
an emerging new science called Chaos theory.
One transforming idea I took away from that book was there
is no real chaos; there is no real randomness in the universe. Chaos is driven by a point of view or putting
the information into a proper context in order to be understood. It depends on what level or perspective we
observe the randomness at. For example,
just recently I found a listing of phone numbers on a sheet of paper at
home. The numbers did not make sense;
they sort of looked like phone numbers with the typical format of (xxx)
xxx-xxxx. I found out they were numbers
for a game that my son was playing. To
him it all made sense to me it was a chaotic list.
Here is another illustration; a soldier on the battlefield
sees all the events in front of him as confusing and chaotic. He has to trust the commander who has the
bigger picture. The commander has a plan
that makes sense to him and the events going on. He, of course is looking to bring a
successful conclusion to the battle. So
to the commander there is order while to the soldier there is chaos.
Ask yourself: Think of a situation where there was chaos in
your live. Now looking back was there
really chaos or did you just not understand what was going on?
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