On Chaos and a Special Smile.

I watched a video on YouTube last night which explained the principle of chaos theory (although presented not as a theory, but established fact.) I think I got the gist, or at least some of it, but I’m glad my life isn’t dependent on being able to explain it to a bunch of 15-year-olds in a high school science lab.

Part of the problem – along with my lack of intelligence, at least in the matter of far end physics – was that the video was only twenty minutes long and spoken at speed by a man with an American accent who seemed to presume that everybody’s non-tutored brain operates at the same speed as his highly tutored one. There was also a lot of fascinating and rather lovely visual imagery to illustrate the teaching, so how is a person like me, highly attuned as I am to visual imagery, supposed to listen to somebody rattling along like the bullet train to Tokyo instead of regarding the fascinating imagery with some degree of fascination?

One thing I did catch and understand was that Newtonian physics is entirely deterministic, and the move through Einstein and onto quantum enquiry now proves that determinism is accurate only up to a point. Having been a lifelong supporter of Determinist philosophy, that revelation was a bit of a disappointment. And of course, none of it takes into account the big question on which I’m currently a little fixated: does anything in the material universe objectively exist anyway?

Eventually I switched off and came back down to terra firma. I’m more or less resigned to the fact that as long as puppies and kittens continue to look cute, and as long as the Lady B continues to smile at me and her car smells of fresh flowers, and as long as I can dream that somewhere in the world is a person who might one day present me with a bowl of hot baked Alaska and a small pot of fresh cream, all is well. (Even though I know that Dr Pangloss was an idiot.)

And may I be permitted to add a brief note on the subject of the Lady B’s smile? I may? Here goes then:

I have observed that there are many widely differing varieties of smile. There’s the forced smile, the disingenuous or fake smile, the polite smile, the formal smile, the excited smile, the mischievous smile… I could probably go on if I could be bothered; I recognise them all instinctively. But the fact is that the Lady’s smile is none of these. It’s a simple, natural smile of projected warmth. When she smiles at you it’s like walking into a warm house after you’ve spent the past couple of hours freezing your butt off working in the frigid garden. And that’s why it’s so welcome.

Thank you for your indulgence.