Chaos To Coherence
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that everything in the universe tends towards disorder, and in complex systems, chaos is the norm. So you'd naturally expect the universe to be messy. And yet we can observe occasions of spontaneous order, the synchronization of metronomes, the perfectly timed orbits of moons, the simultaneous flashes of fireflies, and even the regular beating of your heart.
What puts these things in order in spite of nature's tendency for disorder?
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Synchronization of Metronomes
The metronomes are out of sync initially. When empty cans are placed underneath, magic starts. The whole board is now free to move side-to-side, and the metronomes start influencing each other into synchronization. And then we let it go.
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This works regardless of the number of metronomes you have. The platform just goes whichever way the majority of metronomes are pushing it.
I like to think of it actually visually by thinking about people that are running around a track. Like suppose you're running with your friend and maybe your friend is faster than you.
Your friend says, you know, come on, move it, hurry it up, because you're dawdling, you're slow, you're falling behind. So if you have enough fortitude and you try hard enough, and if the friend is sympathetic enough to slow down, then the coupling between you is strong enough to overcome that inherent difference in your natural running speeds.
But if you're not very good friends, or you know, if you can't quite suck it up to move yourself faster, then the coupling will not be strong enough to overcome that difference, and one person will start lapping the other.
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The fireflies of Southeast Asia are apparently good enough friends because they synchronize their flashes. Even though each one has its own particular frequency at which it likes to flash, they couple to each other strongly enough so that hundreds, even thousands can flash together in the same split second.
There's a great simulation of this by Nikki Case. You start with individual fireflies just doing their thing, and then you can turn on the interaction between them. Now, in the Koromoto model, this would mean every firefly has an effect on every other one. But in this simulation, a firefly is only affected by its neighbors. If it sees a flash close by, it nudges its internal clock forward a little bit, so it'll flash sooner than it would've otherwise. Now, what's remarkable about this is even though the interactions are small and close range, over time, you can see waves traveling through all the fireflies, and eventually they're all flashing at once.
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Like you might think if you increase the coupling, you just sort of gradually get a system more and more synchronized. That's not what happens. It's sort of like the way water doesn't gradually freeze as you lower the temperature, it's water, water, water as you're lowering the temperature and then at a critical temperature, the molecules suddenly start to change their state and become solid instead of liquid and, and this is a sort of time rather than space version of the same thing.
They sort of lock their phases in time once you pass a critical level of coupling, and at that point the sort of crystallization in time is the phenomenon that we call synchronization.