The Newtonian Worldpicture
For the last three centuries science has been dominated by the Newtonian model, that is, the worldview arising out of the work of Sir Isaac Newton in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Following Newton, a standard physical model of the world emerged one of particles objects that had mass but no size attracted to one another by gravitation and moving according to the laws that Newton, among others, had described. This model fitted well with the mathematical analysis called the...
Symmetry Versus Asymmetry
Nowadays descriptions of female beauty usually find their home, largely for want of anywhere else, in the literature of erotica. Take the following example, which is fairly typical For as long as I can remember I have found the sight or description of a pair of pretty legs of a young woman an object of delight. This is a fairly unexceptional declaration, as it would appear to be shared by the majority of the male half of the population, as witness the abundance of magazines, novels,...
Attractors Of The Heart
Chaotic systems have fractal strange attractors,5 which have a fractional dimension. As we saw in chapter 4, we can measure the fractal dimension as an indication of how chaotic the system is. Since there is a strange attractor underlying a chaotic system, we can say that chaos also has a dimension, called the correlation dimension, which is that of the fractal attractor associated with the chaotic system. The correlation dimension of a chaotic system is one of its most important features...
Chris Dracup Northumbria
Schopenhauer said that a friend in conversation was the midwife at the birth of a thought. If so then a number of my friends have certainly earned certificates in midwifery. Among them Richard Kenyon, Victor Serebriakoff, Robin Smith, Sherrie Reynolds, all of my family, Fred Abraham, Malcolm Weller, Elliott Mid-dleton, and Boris Somod were called upon to facilitate a delivery, sometimes in the middle of their night. Conversations not followed immediately by a birth with Sue Aylwin, Ronnie...
Chaotic Systems
Far from being random, as common usage implies, chaotic systems follow strict laws that is why the functioning of such systems is called deterministic chaos. Chaotic systems are those that are influenced by very small changes in their controlling factors, like the weather, economics, social and management structures, and the brain and central nervous system. What these disparate things have in common is that they are often delicately poised between one state and another and so can easily be...