DSC 598 THE CULTURE OF OBJECTS CREATIVE NONFICTION ESSAY

LIU Hongyang_MSD_NPI

CHAOS PENDULUM: AS A METAPHOR

-Got a minute? -No. -Come on, you just got off the phone. You're fine, 30 seconds. -Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight... -I was just driving over here, and I thought I was coming to basically apologies, but I'm not. -You didn't come here to apologies? -Look, that goes without saying, and I'm working on that. But I haven't been entirely upfront with you, and I just want to try to make good. Can I move this? This is crazy. It's like a Ferris wheel going. I'm trying to get some... -No

See that dialogs above there? That is not the conversion between me and my boyfriend. Thats the conversion between Pepper and Tony Stark. It was the winter of 2010 when the DVD version of Iron Man 2 was just released. As two juniors who only need to take some really casual courses, basically Song and I could sit idle all through a Sunday and watched television or movies together. So at that Sunday, we watched Iron Man 2s DVD.

I took the remote controller in front of me, pressed down the pause button, and pointed the monitor and said, Do you know what the gadget was called? That Ferris wheel stands on Peppers office desk. Song turned around and looked at me. Chaos pendulum I said, But as far as I am concerned, I am pretty sure it also can be called as swinging sticks kinetic energy sculpture. And that was the second time I started my exploration about the chaos pendulum and chaos theory as an outsider. I was a junior student in industrial design, always like to show off my knowledge about some irrelevant area.

Speaking of chaos theory, perhaps some people may not have heard of it. After all, it is a modern science theory. It was come out after World War II. When we go to school (I mean High School here), we can only learn classical Newtonian mechanics in the science classes. But when I was a freshman in the Beijing University of Technology, I choose a physical course as an elective course inexplicably. The course is Physical Environment Demo and Expand. I still remember that I didnt go to the first class because I got up late. And my presentation topic at that class was The principle of chaotic pendulum.
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LIU Hongyang_MSD_NPI

Not because I was interested in this topic, just because one of my classmate helped me sign up that topic sheet. Before she signed the sheet for me, the topics like Resonance effect, Electromagnetic induction, and centrifugal force and Centripetal force which look understandable have already been chosen. So it seems that the chaos pendulum was not what I wanted to do, it was kind like what left to me and what I had to do.

Several pages in my presentation slideshow

It had taken me a while to translate all these presentation topics from Chinese into English in order to write this essay. As you can see, in my presentation slideshow, I used swinging sticks kinetic energy sculpture instead of Chaos pendulum as the English title at my Physical Environment Demo and Expand class. At that time, I had nowhere also to figure out the correct name of that gadget in English. The name on the presentation was just a substitution which could demonstrate the function of the chaos pendulum. It was so awkward, I am glad that nobody else pointed out the mistake, so I assumed that nobody listened carefully in that class. Anyway, that presentation could be seen as the first time I touched surface of Chaos.

The Chaos pendulum in Iron Man 2

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LIU Hongyang_MSD_NPI

A double rod pendulum animation showing chaotic behavior

A double pendulum consists of a bar swinging from a pivot, with a second pendulum attached to the first bars end. While the double pendulum is a simple physical system, it is hard to find another dev ice this simple that exhibits so wide a range of behavior. Starting the pendulum from a slightly different initial condition would result in a completely different trajectory. Give it a little push and the motion is fairly predictable. But give it a bigger push bingo, welcome to chaos! I explained it to Song and tried to make it sounds as easy as possible. Since Song is a Chemical engineering student, his knowledge of scientific things is far more than mine. When I saw his puzzled look, I realized that this would be the only one chance I can beat him in the scientific area, I guess.

Since I watched the Iron Man 2, I regained the study of chaos theory just for fun and to satisfy my curiosity. I started to talk to my friends about it. Basically they all asked me same question. What chaos theory can do? It is that useful as what Newtonian mechanics can do? I cannot answer their questions at all. The knowledge of chaos theory is always a mystery for me. No matter how many book and documentary I have read and watched, I was still an outsider who was eagerly to scrape the surface of it.

After I read some books about the chaos theory, I started to think about the world. English poet Alexander Pope was moved by Newton's accomplishments to write the famous epitaph:

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;

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DSC 598 THE CULTURE OF OBJECTS CREATIVE NONFICTION ESSAY God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.

LIU Hongyang_MSD_NPI

But actually with the chaos theory is putting forward, the old understanding of nature system have been shaken. See the leaf veins below, according to what Alan Turing said, there must had a formula which can figure out the shape and the direction of the veins, maybe be entire nature. The veins look so complicated indeed. The pattern on the leaf could be developed from a really simple formula.

Leaf veins (Image source: http://img5.pcpop.com/ArticleImages/500x375/2/2733/002733746.jpg) Maybe Turings theory is too sophisticated to reflect into our real life. But I am pretty sure that the video chat test would be much more easily to understand.

Couple of days ago when I racked my brain to figure out a vivid way to demonstrate the application of chaos theory around our daily life, one of my old friends, Tina, came to visit me. I told her that I want to explain the importance of initial sensitivity and interference during the chaos phenomenon. And she provided me a really good advice. So we set up a home environment lab (there are a little bit exaggerated) by using my Samsung galaxy 3 and my laptop. First I need to find a way to make sure that I can use voice or video system to connect my two electronic devices together. I used QQ. In China we use QQ as an efficient internet based communication tool, just the similar as Skype. So what I have done was

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LIU Hongyang_MSD_NPI

put my two devices together and keep them in the same plane. Then, put one of the device speakers into mute mood selective. So the first time, I mute laptops speakers.

So lets start to talk to them Tina said. Hello! I said. And we can heard the voice goes through my laptops MIC, and then cellphones speakers, laptops MIC, and then cellphones speakers. You may think that the hello would keep continuously like these forever. In fact, the voice began to start the self-feedback loop in the way that we expectation, everything seemed very smooth. But when the sound loops went through to 7-8 times, the voice started to become unconsolidated, and gradually became blurred, and hardly to tell. So it finally became the noise that we were not unable to distinguish. Perhaps many people have had a similar experience in your everyday life, but they never thought about why. Is the problem about our current signal transmission technology?

Video chat test with Tina

And then we did this test again. But at the second time, the speaker of cellphone was muted. Just as everything happened before, after 7-8 times clearly Hello! the voice started to become vague. But here is a different; the noise was sound so much different than the former one. Holding an attitude that this should be an experimental study in mind, and to prove that the noise is the resulting from the feedback loop rather than transfer process itself, we muted two devices speakers. Things were becoming funny. There was no noise anymore. Hence, I can say that with the feedback loop was closed, the noise was not extended. I was glad that I finished a small experimental at home, and it even had

DSC 598 THE CULTURE OF OBJECTS CREATIVE NONFICTION ESSAY

LIU Hongyang_MSD_NPI

experimental control group! I need to tell these to Song, he always thought that he is the only one who knows what the experimental control group means but not me.

So this is the chaos, I mean, the noise is the chaos. After 7-8 times iterate in that feedback loop, it starts to become a chaos. It was still a simple transfer process, but not a liner one. Every time, when Hello! transfers between two devices, an unpredictable result would finally be come out. It depends on the voice we said at the beginning.

But this small home-lab test transformed chaos pendulum, for me, from a scientific into a philosophical object. It seemed now to reveal the limitations of perception. If minor change factors in cycling launched incalculable and unpredicted results under the chaos theory category, didnt this mean that something would always be beyond the horizon of perception, unable to be captured? I am afraid that we have to admit that. Thats why we cannot predicted weather accurately and how the butterfly effect happened.

Quote a sentence in Hamlet: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Life is so unpredictable, for us, for people who forget to see the world from the macro the perspective. Maybe the aims of an ordinary person understand chaos theory is not to rely on it to create and change anything decidedly, and the use of chaos theory may have no way to change the social reality around us and the present state of life. But the understanding of some simply knowledge would be increased; maybe you would concern more about the thinking process; query the traditional thinking of Newton's law; give more expectations for the future life and reverie of the unknown world.

So after 20 minutes yell to those electronic devices, Tina and I were starving. I want to bake some purple sweet potato and yam paste cream pancake, would you like to try some? she said. Whats that? I dont know either, try something new. Lets see whats gonna happen in the oven!