Boundaries of Order (Butler Shaffer)
- Highlight Loc. 797-804 | Added on Monday, December 26, 2011, 01:10 AM
If we think of order as a kind of information system, our failure to discover the underlying harmony or regularity may lead us to conclude that we are facing disorderly conditions. But isn’t the difference between what we think of as order and disorder accounted for only by the state of our understanding rather than by the rest of nature? Has the universe suddenly changed from “chaos” to “order,” or has there only been a change in our perspectives—encouraged, perhaps, by the availability of improved technologies—such that we are now able to discover these hidden patterns of order? And isn’t the process of discovering order in what seems to us disorderly, only a synonym for learning? Harlow Shapley expressed the point in these words: “Chaos is but unperceived order; it is a word indicating the limitations of the human mind and the paucity of observational facts. The words ‘chaos,’ ‘accidental,’ ‘chance,’ ‘unpredictable,’ are conveniences behind which we hide our ignorance.”
