Posted By crates on March 24, 2009

Today, while on a walk I was staring at the pipe where my little stream exits after traveling beneath and across the road.  The stream parallels the road for most of the way down to the beach, and just before the beach is reached, the stream enters a large concrete pipe, travels beneath the road, and exits on the other side of the road where it eventually runs into the sea.

This end of the pipe is covered with moss, and the water as it exits,  splashes merrily on a pile of rocks below.  So I was standing there, staring almost hypnotized at the smooth stream of water as it came out of the mossy pipe and watching the splashing of the water.   As I watched, I was aware of something that began to niggle at my attention.  I gradually realized that it was the splashing of the water on the rocks that was beginning to rankle me.

I could see that the splashing of the water appeared to be  almost random in the pattern of the drops as they bounced about.  The water as it exited appeared to be smooth and uniform with no visible turbulence.  Thus it seemed to me that if the water flow was uniform and constant then it seemed that the splashing should be uniform with the drops falling in a recognizable pattern.  But it wasn’t.  The drops splashed in what appeared to be an erratic and  random sort of way.  The splashing was not uniform at all.

This set my mind off on several tangents.  The water flowing through the pipe reminded me first of all of laminar flow and turbulence, and how when Werner Heisenberg (of quantum mechanics fame) was supposedly asked what he would ask God when he met him, said “When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.”

This apparent dissonance in the splashing of the water also reminded me of one of the problems in the Big Bang Theory.  According to the theory the early universe should have been uniform and smooth, but it was not.  It appeared after a short while to be lumpy and dimpled.  Gravity alone doesn’t seem to be the reason that the universe has congealed into galaxies, stars, planets and people in such a short time.  Perhaps dark matter had something to do with it?

And what about the little game called Quincunx that Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, came up with (from which developed the pin ball machines)?  Think of a board with nails stuck in it with slots at the bottom.  When marbles or steel bearings are released at the top and allowed to fall to the bottom, each one strikes a nail and bounces either to the left or to the right before eventually arriving at one of the slots at the bottom.  Here is an illustration of the apparatus if you find it hard to imagine.  Due to the fact that there are many more paths to the center slots than to the slots at the margin, more marbles collect in the center slots than those at the sides.  Eventually a bell shaped or normal curve is formed.  The fate of one of the marbles is unknown when it is released at the top, but the fate of many of these marbles can be predicted statistically.

This in turn reminded me of a fertilized egg as it proceeds through the blastula, gastrula and other early stages of the embryo, each cell containing the same DNA and each cell, like the marbles falling down the plank, eventually turning down a particular developmental path becoming specialized into epithelial, nervous, connective or muscle tissue.

And what you may ask does all this have to do with anything?  Well, the apparent randomness of the splashing water proceeding from what appeared to be the smooth flowing water through the pipe, made me think of turbulence, which reminded me of the lumpy nature of the universe which reminded me of the apparent randomness of the bouncing marbles which actually show a pattern, which reminded me of the identical cells developing down what seemed random developmental paths to form organized tissue.

When I put it that way it all makes sense…doesn’t it?

Categories: nature
Tags: Add new tag, cellular differentiation, complex systems, emergent properties, laminar flow, quantum mechanics, stochastic processes, the big bang, turbulence