Chaos can be seductive
I believe the nineteen fifties and sixties were a rich era of intellectual efforts. That is understandable: After the horrific World War II; it must have spurred a lot of thought to get to the underlying causes. This also validates Hegel’s philosophy of the thesis and anti-thesis and how the confrontation between the two could lead to the synthesis …albeit, temporarily… because it turns out that the conflict between thesis and anti-thesis would again turn up… And society iteratively and merrily keeps skipping ahead, like a girl playing hop-scotch.
It was that period which led to the discovery of a branch of mathematics called “Chaos Theory”. James Gleick’s book “Chaos” was quite fascinating – so much so, I suspected it could lead to faddishness.
And it did: The dictum that emerged from that subject Sensitive dependence on initial conditions and its shorter version “Butterfly effect” got used so often that it got misused. There even a movie by that name – and for the life of me, that movie really had nothing to do with Chaos Theory. (It is now named as “complexity theory” in some areas, maybe the fad got under the skin of some mathematicians)
Then, when sincere authors such as Dr Michael Crichton who tried to explain the subject – it went in another direction. “Jurassic Park”, his work, was really about the topic but everyone looked at it as an adventure story; even a children’s story.
The two authors are reputedly the two authors of the book “The collapse of Chaos” – that’s a neat book on ChaosTheory, and no, It is not a click-bait. It is not how Chaos theory is wrong. It is a fascinating book on how nature maybe at work; and the kind of mathematical chaos that these mathematicians talk about is possibly inevitable; the final distillate. I guess a title “Chaos is an inevitable distillate” may sound obtuse.
So much for the background. What I am building up to is this: As per Chaos Theory; some (and NOT all) processes display this particular behavior where a tiny difference in the very initial stages of the model of a process could bloom into a problem in the model of the eventual results.
Now the word model which I emphasized there, should be thought on quite deeply. When Lorenz and others explained Chaos theory in weather, the fine detail really is that initial small changes expressed in a model would lead to chaotic changes, again in the model. Not all modeled process display this chaotic results, but some do.
Now the paper that explained that effect unfortunately was named “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set a Tornado in Texas?”
The word people forgot the key word in that title was “predictability” i.e. Lorenz was talking of the model and not about the real world itself. It seems he was quite at a loss to title the paper, and he unfortunately chose that one. It did catch people’s attention for sure.
People latched on to the other term “flap of a butterfly” and then it became a bad folklore and worse meme.
Nevertheless, even if the model during the later stages of the progression of the modeled process was chaotic; that can and indeed often does lead to serious problems in the real world too.
As it is people often confuse metaphors with reality. So confusing a model with reality is a breeze. And when you take the final model that emerges, people tend to think that is the reality itself.
So the reason why AIM (Architecture Information Modeling) is important is because one needs to carefully examine what could be the small issues in the initial stages of model of the design, which could later on create serious issues in the model of the finalized design.
Of course, by and large, this question has never been seriously asked in architectural theory. It is high-time we did. As it is we are swayed over by the glitter and glamour of finalized designs emerging from complex BIM and rendering software; that many really can’t understand that that particular model at the final stages actually could be a chaotic model!
And yet, the final model that architects create can look so tantalizingly possible, that we don’t realize that we are being seduced. In fact most architects have not really seen how these mathematicians model the phase-state of chaos models: Many results in quite fascinating and seducing fractal images (some of which ironically do look like butterfly wings; just to add fuel to the confusion)
No wonder, they are called strange attractors. And if you fall in love with them, then you are doomed (Hmmm… I can think of human examples here too, strangely)