David Peat

138 From Certainty to UncertaintyAgain one of the powerful lessons of this book is being repeatedfor us. That is, our acceptance of a degree of uncertainty is the veryessence of being alive in the universe. Many systems in nature and humansociety have evolved through processes of self-organization. Theywere not put together in a mechanical way, by bringing various partstogether and arranging them according to some hierarchical schemeand overarching law. Rather they emerged through the interlocking offeedback loops and out of flows to and from the external environment.In this sense, the stabilities of our lives, of our organizations and oursocial structures, do not arise out of fundamental certainties but fromout of the womb of chance, chaos, and openness. Patterns in a pan ofheated water and the vortex in a river are particularly simple examplesof order emerging out of chaos. Likewise human society itself, with itscities, international governments, and global economics can only existthrough this dynamical dance between chaos and order.The open systems that fall under the umbrella of chaos theory havea large number of components that interact together and engage inmutual feedback. Traditionally, physicists preferred to study isolatedsystems where all conditions could be carefully controlled. Such systemsbehave in regular ways and contain no surprises, so that carefullycontrolled experiments always match the predictions of theory. Buttoday we realize that nature’s open systems are far richer and moreinteresting. Their behavior is a product of their ability to organizethemselves and respond in varied ways to changing environments. It isonly relatively recently, because of the long-standing theoretical difficultiesinvolved, that such systems have begun to be studied in a systematicway.This contrast between the versatility and flexibility of self-organizationand the behavior of mechanical systems can be illustrated bycomparing life in a village to that within a traditional army. To functioneffectively during war, an army must have a predetermined andwell-understood hierarchy of soldiers, noncommissioned officers, officers,and so on up to the general staff of generals and field marshals.Recruits are put through a rigorous training and drill that teaches themto obey orders without question and to carry out tasks in a repetitiveway. As soldiers they can be slotted in, like cogs in a wheel, so that, as