Tuesday 21 October 2008

Not recommended: frantically seeking escape from a chaotic situation, we find ourselves in.

What powers the rise of emergent properties?


Not recommended: frantically seeking for a way to escape from a chaotic situation, we find ourselves in. Prey to our emotions. Looking for a quick getaway.

As I read through the paper 'Chaos-assisted tunneling in dielectric microcavities', by Viktor A. Podolskiy* and Evgenii E. Narimanov, stating that the asymmetric microcavities introduced chaotic orbits. After some deliberations that notion had been associated in my mind, with what I read in the National Science Foundation MRSC declaration of a research program on 'Emergent Properties Resulting from Constraints'. That goes along with what I was contemplating about the significance of incompatible forces in instantiating emergent properties in systems. States, objects, processes, systems that emerge endowed with novel properties?

That, as in the case of the microlasers studied by Viktor A. Podolskiy* and Evgenii E. Narimanov, lead to chaos-assisted quantum tunneling and drastically changes lifetimes and emission patterns of produced rays. All made possible from the constraints imposed by using asymmetric instead of circular resonators.

And in the case brought forward by the MRSC research program, the confinement of macromolecules in cells, to very small and crowded volumes having major consequences for structure and dynamics. Or the effect of chirality, the concept behind the reason why a left-handed glove does not fit on a right hand, frustrates long range order in both crystals and membranes, resulting in new structures, with the implications of the second effect of chirality, that leads to finite self-limiting self-assembled structures, still to be contemplated.

All cases where imposed constraints introduce chaos, and result in chaos created novel objects, that emerge as attractors. A theme similar to what we are going through in our daily lives. A notion along the lines of the self-similarity principle in chaotically developed systems.

There is not a day passing, without finding ourselves squeezed, cornered, tested by constraints of any sort imposed upon our selves. That is when chaos undertakes the task to pull us through. It is why, we are never really trapped, as we always find a way out or there is a way out.

However, our first instinctive move is to escape from the offensive situation. A sterile approach. We leave our emotions full reign to direct our actions and in doing so we loose the chance to take stock of the solutions chaos unravels before us. Overwhelmed by our emotions, we are incapable of distilling out of the chaotic situation the lessons to be taught out of the rich bed of solutions on offer. The novel properties of the emerged state. Succumbing to the urge laid down by emotions, nagging problems will continue to scourge the individual.

The human mind is equipped to deal with such situations ... situations where a quick, fast solution is required. It uses our quantum mechanical computation processes based upon the quantum mechanical superposition principle.

Should enter the chaotic situation and learn from it.

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