21. Chaos and Reductionism

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Stanford University.

And we are not going to work our way

through the behavior on the right and march to the left.

And instead, we'll be trying to come up

with some ideas that are going to apply to everything

we hear about in here.

And overall, these are probably the most difficult lectures

of the course, the most difficult material,

in part because I'm not sure if I completely understand

what I'm talking about.

But also because this is intrinsically

some really different ways of thinking about things

in the realm of science.

And that's one of the reasons why

I forced you guys to read this Chaos book.

And again, as I think I mentioned in the first lecture,

this incites a subset of people to passionate enthusiasm

about the book.

It incites another small subset into just the most greatest

level of irritation that this was assigned.

And everybody else is just vaguely

puzzled and kind of sort of sees the point, but how come?

This book, when I first read it, and so my first introduction

to the whole field, this was like the first book

I had read where I finished it and immediately started over

again, the first one since, like,

Where the Wild Things Are in terms of influence.

This was an incredibly challenging book

in terms of questioning all the ways in which I

think about sort of reductive science.

And hopefully, it will do the same for you.

And as part of it, posted, there is the one and only homework

assignment in the entire course, which,

just to make things easier, will not be collected or looked at.

But what you should do is there is a whole exercise up there

in generating something that are called cellular automata.

Do not panic yet.

There's plenty of time to panic.