DO DICE PLAY GOD?

Ian Stewart

Mathematics Institute University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL M@CAW

Albert Einstein believed that God does not play dice with the Universe; that the world
in which we live is governed by precise laws rather than chance. The branch of
mathematics popularly known as Chaos Theory clarifies the question through a new
paradox: precise laws may offer the appearance of randomness. As a result our
cherished beliefs about determinism, predictability, and complexity are back in the
melting-pot.

When Einstein's Theory of Relativity achieved public recognition, most people

interpreted it as saying that 'everything is relative', a comfortable philosophy that, for
example, justifies the rich ignoring the poor on the grounds that others are yet poorer.
Actually, that's not what Einstein was saying at all: he was telling us that the speed of
light is not relative, but absolute. Really, it should have been named the Theory of
Nonrelativity. I think something similar has happened to Chaos Theory in the public
mind. People are taking it to mean that 'everything is random', and some are using that
to justify economic or ecological mismanagement. How unfair, for example, to blame
the Chancellor of the Exchequer for not controlling inflation or unemployment, when
'everyone knows' that these are subject to random influences out of the Chancellor's
control! But Chaos Theory doesn't offer that sort of excuse at all, because its message
is far more complex than the popular image: some things behave predictably, some
don't; some things that we think we understand may behave in very funny ways; some
things that appear random may obey laws we haven't yet spotted; and most things
don't fit into any of these categories at all!

I'd like to put the question the other way around, hence my title. To what extent is our
world determined by chance events? Can the organised structures in the universe
protect themselves against random destruction, and if so, how? For that matter, how
do organised structures arise in the first place, in a universe of chaos?

A timely example is evolution. Until recently, most people who accept that evolution
takes place at all have tended to view it as a process of increasing diversity, with the
human race perched at the pinnacle of creation. The purpose of evolution is to
produce us. This attitude is largely subconscious, but it shows up again and again, as
Stephen Jay Gould argues in his book Wonderful Life. There he describes the bizarre
fossils of the Burgess shale, which between them encompass more biological diversity
than exists anywhere on Earth today. He draws the lesson that evolution is a
contingent process: at key stages, what happens depends entirely on chance.

He concludes that if evolution were to be run again, the chance of any intelligent
lifeform developing is minute.

That may be true: certainly we can't perform the experiment to make sure. But Gould's
argument ignores an important feature of the evolutionary process: convergence.
Evolution tends to attain similar ends by different means. The marsupials of Australia
bear remarkable resemblances to placental mammals elsewhere. Pterosaurs, birds,
bats, insects, and fish have all developed some form of flight; so for that matter have
dandelion seeds. Senses such as vision or hearing are other examples. And so,
perhaps, are brains.

Convergence shows that processes are not affected just by chance: they are also bound
by hidden constraints. In evolution, the constraints include Darwinian 'survival of the
fittest', which eliminates vast numbers of imaginable structures, and the laws of
physics and chemistry, which preclude even vaster numbers of structures from being
possible even in principle.

The picture of evolution that we thereby obtain is more subtle: neither goal-directed
determinism nor pure contingency, but a mixture. Against a background of random
variation, the process takes place within some body of constraints and stabilising
influences. It is neither pure order nor pure chaos, but a kind of competitive game
played between the two. How do recognisable structures arise from such a game?
Why does neither player win?

According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of the universe - its
degree of disorder - continually increases. Our ultimate fate, from this point of view,
is Heat Death, a state in which all temperature variations have evened out as heat is
transferred from hot bodies to cool ones. Nothing interesting happens and everywhere
looks just like everywhere else. Tourism is having a similar effect on human culture.
Life appears to contradict the second law of thermodynamics. It seems to me that if it
really does do this, then there's something wrong with the law! But there are so many
legal loopholes in the second law that we need not worry too much that it may rule out
our own existence. Comforting as that may be, it doesn't explain why the chaos in the
universe doesn't just wipe us out, or why we don't organise our world so successfully
that nothing unpredictable ever happens.

I need a word to capture what I have in mind. Out of deference to the second law, let
me call it a negentrope. A negentrope is a 'negative disorderer': any structure that
tends towards self-organisation, self-propagation, and self-modification. It has
inherent stability of structure, but not so stable that it can't change at all. Negentropes
exist, for we are negentropes. Every living creature on Earth is a negentrope. So are
cultural tricks like language, evolutionary tricks like intelligence, and technological
tricks like metalworking. Negentropes do not occur easily or often, but they occur
fairly regularly, and once they've arisen they explode. One of the earliest negentropes
was what Richard Dawkins calls 'the replicator'. This is a chemical molecule with the
capacity to reproduce itself. It may take millions of years for such a molecule to arise
by random association of atoms; but by golly, once it does, it's soon going to be found
everywhere! In the same way, once metalworking is discovered, it will spread
throughout human culture, and it will engender all kinds of new gadgets, from swords
to spoons to satellites. Negentropes are enablers, they open up new realms of the
possible.

Negentropes cannot appear on their own, however. They rely for their existence on a
rich environment, a context. The replicator can only arise in a vast sea of chemicals;
metalworking can only be developed within a culture that transmits ideas. The context
affects the development, and makes some aspects of it virtually inevitable. In a
warrior culture, the discovery of metalworking will lead inevitable to knives and
swords. In a hunting culture it will lead to spears and arrowheads. In a fishing culture,
to fishhooks. The arrival of a new negentrope is a major event, because - in its context
- it triggers a whole sequence of changes. Moreover, these changes are stable in the
sense that the new realms of the possible are implicit in the context, 'waiting' to be
triggered. Transistors trigger television, but they don't give us a new breed of wheat.

Do dice play god? Does chaos reign supreme? No, because within a chaotic context it
may be possible for negentropes to emerge. If they do, then by their nature they will
not go away again, and once they exist they will tend to become more complex and
more organised. Conversely, a population of negentropes, however organised it may
be, can in turn become the context for a new kind of chaos: that's classic Chaos
Theory, determinism implies randomness! Neither order nor chaos can win the game
once and for all, because by doing so it would change the game to favour its opponent.

We are negentropes in a context of biochemical contingency. Our intelligence is a

negentrope in a context of cell biology. Our culture is a negentrope in a context of
interacting individuals, and so is our technology. Negentropes are defences against
chaos.

But they can also create it. Because of our success in constructing negentropes, new
sources of chaos and confusion beset our world. Too many of our negentropes have
been developed within too limited a context. Fire protects us against cold, but its by-
product, greenhouse gases, threatens global warming. One man's picnic-table is
another's ravaged rainforest. Nuclear weapons may suppress the chaos of war, but
they also open up the chasm of total self-destruction. Religions stabilise individual
cultures but wreak intercultural havoc. The road to Hell is paved with flawed
negentropes.

The problem with negentropes is that, flawed or not, it's very hard to get rid of them.
Our technological and cultural negentropes have become so widespread that they are
forming a new chaotic context in their own right. The future of our world may well
depend upon finding a new set of negentropes, functioning within that context, for the
control of culture and technology; negentropes that do not contain the seeds of their
own - and our - destruction.
Does God Play Dice? by Ian Stewart, Basil Blackwell, pp 310, Pounds
sterling 15

FEW books have reached the advertisements on the sides of the escalators
in London’s Underground, but James Gleick’s book on chaos is one of them.
If the passengers on the underground can see chaos all around them, without
the help of scientists, and there is already one popular book on chaos,
what need is there for another one? Ian Stewart’s Does God Play Dice? gives
the answer. Gleick’s book is essentially a personal account of the American
contribution to the science of chaos. Stewart set himself the more daunting
task of putting the science into its historical context, and explaining
what it is about.

The title of the book recalls a letter from Einstein to Max Born ‘You
believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order.’ When
Einstein refused to believe that God played dice, it was quantum mechanics
that he had in mind; but his philosophy captures the attitude of an entire
age to classical mechanics. The metaphor of dice for chance applies across
the board. Does determinism leave room for chance? We now know that classical
mechanics is more mysterious than even Einstein imagined. The very distinction
he was trying to emphasise, between the randomness of chance and the determinism
of law, is called into question. Deterministic laws can produce behaviour
that appears random. Order can breed its own kind of chaos. The question
is not so much whether God plays dice, but how God plays dice. It is this
discovery that has given us the science of chaos and its implications have
yet to make their full impact on our scientific thinking.

Deterministic chaos has its own laws, and inspires new experimental
techniques. There is no shortage of irregularities in nature, and some of
them may be manifestations of chaos. Turbulent flow of fluids, reversals
of the Earth’s magnetic field, irregularities of the heartbeat, the convection
patterns of liquid helium, the tumbling of celestial bodies, gaps in the
asteroid belt, the growth of insect populations, the dripping of a tap,
the progress of a chemical reaction, the metabolism of cells, changes in
the weather, the propagation of nerve impulses, oscillations of electronic
circuits, the motion of a ship moored to a buoy, the bouncing of a billiard
ball, the collisions of atoms in a gas, the underlying uncertainty in quantum
mechanics – these are quoted in the book as a few of the problems to which
the mathematics of chaos has been applied.

How can the applications be so wide? Because chaos is a consequence

of nonlinearity, and most phenomena are nonlinear. The very word nonlinearity
is deceptive: it is as if most of biology were called the study of non-elephant
life.

There are few mathematicians with Stewart’s sense of history, and the
ability to put the ideas of mathematics into words with the help of analogy
and the apt quote. He starts with the Greeks and the clockwork model of
the Universe that developed from Newton’s success in applying his laws of
motion to the Solar System. He contrasts it with probability theory which
provided the laws of error, and points out how the dichotomy of determinism
and probability diverted attention from a whole range of problems which
could not be treated using the traditional methods.

The historical introduction finishes with Poincare, as the last universalist,

and the first of the moderns, who paved the way for the science of chaos
in the last decades of the 19th century. Then the going gets tougher: linearity
and nonlinearity, phase space of many dimensions, attractors strange and
otherwise get their explanations and their pictures. Some of the explanations
succeed, but a few do not, as they are unlikely to be followed by anyone
who has not met the subject before. For example, Smale’s work has had a
profound influence on the mathematics of dynamics, but it is very difficult
to put his ideas across at this level. But then the examples follow, and
the clarity returns.

Sometimes the literary allusions are overdone: for example, Japanese

haiku poems are very elegant, but it looked to me as if they were dragged
into the book by the scruff of the neck. Perhaps the author was aiming for
the Japanese market? Stewart’s book can be read at more than one level.
For an elementary introduction to the science of chaos, skip the difficult
bits and read the introductions to the chapters and the conclusions before
tackling the meat in the middle, which may be too difficult to digest anyway.
At a more advanced level, if you have been brought up in the tradition of
linear mathematics, and you want to learn about the wonders of nonlinearity,
read the historical introduction, and go through the mathematical sections
in order of difficulty, rather than the order in which they are written.

In any case, this is a book well worth reading, and a valuable contribution
to the literature on chaos.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12316725-500-the-order-in-chaos-review-
of-does-god-play-dice-by-ian-stewart/#ixzz5xiFvDzXa