Sync

A book by Steven Strogatz, professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University.

Notes

21 Similarities to Nonzero’s “Tit for Tat”; “Each one was responding robotically to the impulses fired by others, with no goal in mind (firefly blinking simulation)

27 Sync is mathematically inevitable–“if you choose a (starting) point at random, you have no chance of picking a bad one”; i.e. one that doesn’t lead to sync. Bad points exist, but it’s like pinning down a line that exists between 2 points but has no thickness.

35 Fireflies do nonzero–by blinking together they can attract females from far away who would never see just one blinking.

37 Women sync reproductive cycles to aid their offspring by having a community with lots of babies at once and thus adequate resources.

42 The brain’s internal clock is synchronized by a number of “sloppy” ones; lowest common denominator? NO–because once the median particles notice they’re close, they decide to become absolutely synched and thus have more pull to get the outliers synched with them (p. 52 “Once a few oscillators happened to sync by chance, their combined, coherent shouting stood out above the background din, and exerted a stronger effect on all the others.”

55 To prove sync, each successive scientist seems to narrow the scope of what they test, in order to prove it absolutely–but for a tiny percentage of events at the end, seemingly…

56 Sync could be called “the science of peer pressure”

62 Interestingly these “ultimate truths” of sync are still very invested in science and mathematics; Einstein’s “make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler” comes to mind.

66 Testing these hypotheses outside the computer is difficult because measuring such small items disturbs the network; the Heisenberg Principle for living things.

69 Weiner, Galileo, Mendel, etc. are “prophets, with a vision of how the world should work”; see Huxley quote below; it’s a different way of science, knowing what you want to find and then setting up your experiments to test for it; but it occassionally works, as for these men.

96 Missing your bedtime/normal falling-asleep time causes your body to try to wait for another major change in body temperature, which is “entrained” to rise and fall at certain hours.

97 Working the night shift causes lots of problems, sleep disorders, operating in the “zombie zone”, disrupted family and social ties.

98 Sunlight the most important sync stimulator.

109 Lasers are synched light waves emitted from atoms.

113 American power grid relies on sync; reminded of Barabasi’s column in the NYTimes about the blackouts in NYC, August 2003; http://www.ryskamp.org/brain/networks/power_outages_and_networks.html

115 When power plants experimented with frequencies of AC, one group tried 25 cycles/second, which caused light bulbs to flicker noticably – seems like it would be like living in a movie (24 fps!); today’s North America standard is 60/sec, the rest of the world is 50/sec

125 One hypothesis for the oceans’ creation is a “wayward planetary embryo” spun out of Jupiter’s orbit (which had water) that hit Earth (which didn’t); traditional explanation is comets but our water is chemically quite different from theirs.

126 “Every electron in the universe is indistinguishable from every other. They never age. They never break or chip. And their perfection makes them capable of group behavior beyond anything we’ve ever experienced.” Small sync is even more impressive than big (planetary, etc) sync.

131 Fermions make things different; they cannot occupy the same space with each other (electrons in neat orbital shells); this leads to differences between elements, rules for chemical bonding, magnetism. Bosons do the opposite, they “are inveterate joiners, conformists. They love to sing along.”

134 Absolute zero seems like the speed of light; you can’t get there by conventional means; but you can get very very close.

135 The idea that electrons can form pairs took 50 years to develop and was stated matter-of-factly in my high school chemistry class–the evolution of knowledge builds upon itself at the cost of absolute derivation of all things for any one person.

138 The value of imperfection in a system; it allows for “grooves” to form, instigated by one leader and many others “drafting” him. If the system was ideal, all would go their own ways.

139 Boys with toys; is it need or competitive desire? Could war just be a way that grown men play? Increasing complexity is necessary for happiness (Flow) and the same old games are boring after a while.

142 True, prompted synchrony creates things not seen in nature; a fluid that behaved nothing like water, a quantum fluid.

158 The true challenge of sync is to predict the group behavior, given what is known about the individuals.

161 Our memory for odors is based on pattern-matching, where our brain’s neurons for smell oscillate at different frequencies to elicit different experiences of smell.

163 Strogatz impressed by his student writing in calligraphy…I need to improve my handwriting, though difficult on the train.

164 A torus is the physical shape of a cyclic event; valuable for visualizing events (E@S, etc?).

167 Strogatz settled on a multipanel screen setup to visualize difficult concepts; “I needed some way to expand my mind, to try to grasp what was going on in this nine-dimensional wilderness.”

171 Human society unlikely to sync because of Strogatz’s four criteria: Vast numbers of individual oscillators (yes); weakly coupled to ensure individuality (no); each coupled to all others the exact same (no); each nearly identical (probably yes).

184 Sync can be persistent without being periodic; so chaos can be synchronized as long as we all proceed in sync through it.

189 Life ruled by chaos is impossible to live; “Every moment would be a moment of truth. Every decision would have long-term consequences that would alter your life beyond recognition…to retain a measure of sanity one has to believe that nearly all such decisions are inconsequential.” Sliding Doors movie explored this.

190 Beyond the Lyapunov time scale (below) it is impossible to predict anything for a system. For the solar system, that limit is 4 billion years, at the dawn of the Earth. So anything could have happened then and we cannot prove it.

200 Francis Ford Coppola’s movie “The Conversation”; a couple uses synchronization in a chaotic environment to provide them with privacy; whispering closely in a loud area so no others can eavesdrop.

216 Spirals the closest Strogatz came to universal truth; they are present in all rhythmic “excitable media”, physical, chemical, and biological.

230 We care about networks because we live in a networked world and are scared by things “whose reach is immense, whose structure we can only dimly perceive, and whose functioning bewilders us.”

231 Genome as a “blueprint” is outdated; things do not follow directly from it. It is more like a “computer”, which reacts dynamically to different situations in a predefined way.

231 Strogatz argues that it’s the pattern, the structure, of the system; not the individuals. Gladwell would disagree, but Flow agrees, so does Cannon.

240 Because we are real people and not some idealized pattern, our friendship circles overlap, introducing randomness to the system. (the problem with the system on page 171).

241 “The slightest bit of randomness contracted the network tremendously”–with just 1% random connections the average length between 2 random items dropped 85%; the ISIS Blender can unite almost all campus with just a few people in it; Gladwell’s “Connectors”, though picked by the structure and not personality type. Perhaps both Gladwell and Strogatz can be right: it IS connectors doing the work; but the connectors are created by the system.

244 “C. elegans” is the organism first chosen to test on because “it is perhaps the simplest organism that shares many of the biological processes essential to human life.”

250 References Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”; no one knows they are part of a system but by working only for self-interest (Flow’s “autotelic” actions), the system self-organizes for greater good.

266 Many similarities to “Tipping Point”: Early adopter (“Maven”) is first to act; if they have the right friends (“Connectors”) the item spreads. Strogatz sees 2 tipping points: one when the groups in the small world coalesce and sync; one when enough of an individual’s neighbors have synched to make it worthwhile for them to sync as well–makes the well-connected resistant to syncing (b/c for the required percentage of their friends to sync, it must be a very high number of people).

267 A “problem” with this (Duncan Watt’s analogy) is that it is idealized; people’s connections are not always similar. But that should just increase the network effect, if a few people hold much of the influence…things will spread faster.

273 Sync is resistable; but only if you WANT to resist! Communist people had no desire to clap faster than the minimum synchrony and thus become wild applause, which is chaotic.

284 Strogatz ends where Hawkins and Doerksen begin: “What is the physical foundation of consciousness?” Could it be synchrony of neurons?

286 Complexity theory taught that simple units interacting could generate unexpected order; but sync is necessary to find out where this order comes from.

Quotes

1 “The laws of thermodynamics seem to dictate the opposite…yet all around us we see magnificent structures…that have somehow managed to assemble themselves.”

69 “The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” – T.H. Huxley, English biologist

97 “Shift work poses major problems for all industrialized societies, problems that will only grow worse. Economics is pushing us to a 24-hour society, with factories and businesses and financial markets operating round the clock.”

104 “Serendipitous discoveries are always made by people in a particular frame of mind, people who are focused and alert because they’re searching for something. They just happen to find something else.”

110 “Imagine you wake up one morning and find yourself on an alien planet, entirely deserted except for a watermelon with a step stool beside it.” – strangest analogy I’ve ever heard!

127 “When I was six years old, my parents gave me a big battery to play with…” Explain anything?

154 “It is a wonderful feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things.” Einstein

170 “You should never trust a fact until it’s been confirmed by theory.” old adage

273 “In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule” – Nietzsche

273 “He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice.” – Einstein

Definitions

3 Coupled oscillators – entities that cycle automatically, that repeat themselves over and over again at more or less regular time intervals.

42 Electroencephalographers – Scientists who measure brain waves looking for characteristic patterns (like Asimov’s Second Foundation.

72 Entrainment – the external synchronization created by falling in step with the outside world

112 Laser – Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation; “every time a photon hits an excited atom it duplicates itself, amplifying the amount of light traveling in that direction.”

129 Fiat – a decree, an order; “Niels Bohr solved the puzzle of nose-diving electrons by sheer fiat. He declared that electrons were …”

159 Self-organized criticality – “Why so many complex systems seem perpetually poised at the brink of catastrophe.” Self correction is critical, like in the Matrix with the “One”.

164 Torus – the physical shape of a cyclic event (my defn.).

190 Lyapunov time – a time scale defined by the inherent dynamics of a system beyond which prediction is impossible for that system.

213 Excitable media – that which, upon stimulation, um, changes…

242 Small-world networks – those that manage to be both small and highly clustered simultaneously. Usually only big networks have the numbers to “specialize” and cluster in groups within them.