The Secret Life of Chaos

This is a film

about one very simple question.

How did we get here?

These are the elements and compounds

from which all humans are made.

They're incredibly,

almost embarrassingly common.

In fact, almost 99% of the human body

is a mixture of air, water,

coal and chalk, with traces of other

slightly more exotic elements

like iron, zinc,

phosphorus and sulphur.

In fact, I've estimated

that the elements

which make up the average

human cost at most a few pounds.

But somehow, trillions of these very

ordinary atoms conspire miraculously

to organise themselves into thinking,

breathing, living human beings.

How the wonders of creation

are assembled from such simple

building blocks, is surely the most

intriguing question we can ask.

You may think that answering it is

beyond the realm of science.

But that's changing.

For the first time, I believe

science has pushed past religion

and philosophy in daring to tackle

this most fundamental of questions.

This film is the story

of a series of bizarre

and interconnected discoveries that

reveal a hidden face of nature.

That woven into its simplest

and most basic laws,

is a power to be unpredictable.

It's about how inanimate matter

with no purpose or design,

can spontaneously

create exquisite beauty.

It's about how the same laws

that make the universe chaotic

and unpredictable, can turn

simple dust into human beings.

It's about the discovery

that there is a strange

and unexpected relationship

between order and chaos.

The natural world really is one

great, blooming, buzzing confusion.

It's a mess of quirky shapes

and blotches.

What patterns there are,

are never quite regular,

and never seem to repeat exactly.

The idea that all this mayhem,

all this chaos, is underpinned,

indeed determined,

by mathematical rules,

and that we can work out what

those rules might be,

runs counter

to our most dearly held intuitions.

So not surprisingly, the first man

to really take on the momentous task

of unravelling

nature's mysterious mathematics,

had a very special and unusual mind.

He was both a great scientist

and a tragic hero.

He was born in 1912, in London.

His name was Alan Turing.

Alan Turing was a remarkable man,

one of the greatest mathematicians

who ever lived.

He discovered many

of the fundamental ideas

that underpin the modern computer.

Also, during the Second World War,

he worked here at Bletchley Park,

just outside today's Milton Keynes,

in what was then a secret

government project called Station X,

which was set up

to crack the German military codes.

The Station X code breakers proved

highly effective,

and Turing's contribution

was crucial.

The work he personally did

to crack German naval codes,

saved thousands of Allied lives

and was a turning point in the war.

But code breaking was just one aspect

of Turing's genius.

Just one part of his

uncanny ability to see patterns

that are hidden from the rest of us.

For Turing, the natural world

offered up the ultimate codes.

And over the course of his life

he'd come tantalisingly

close to cracking them.

Turing was a very original person.

And he had realised that there

was this possibility

that simple mathematical equations

might describe aspects of

the biological world.

And no-one

had thought of that before.

Of all nature's mysteries,

the one that fascinated Turing most

was the idea that there might be

a mathematical basis

to human intelligence.

Turing had very personal

reasons for believing in this.

It was the death of this young

man, Christopher Morcom,

who...Alan Turing, well, he was gay,

and it had been the great emotional

thing of his life at that point.

Christopher Morcom suddenly died.

And, Alan Turing was obviously

very emotionally disturbed by this.

But you can see

that he wanted to put this

in an intellectual

context, a scientific context.

And the question he wanted

to put into context was

what happens to the mind?

What is it?

Turing became convinced that

mathematics could be used to describe

biological systems,

and ultimately intelligence.

This fascination would give

rise to the modern computer,

and later in Turing's life,

an even more radical idea.

The idea that a simple mathematical

description could be given

for a mysterious process that

takes place in an embryo.

The process is called morphogenesis,

and it's very puzzling.

At first, all the cells in

the embryo are identical.

Then, as this footage of a

fish embryo shows,

the cells begin to clump together,

and also become

different from each other.

How does this happen?

With no thought,

no central co-ordination?

How do cells that start off

identical, know to become say, skin,

while others become part of an eye?

Morphogenesis is

a spectacular example

of something called

self-organisation.

And before Turing,

no-one had a clue how it worked.

Then, in 1952,

Turing published this, his paper

with the world's first mathematical

explanation for morphogenesis.

The sheer chutzpah

of this paper was staggering.

In it, Turing used

a mathematical equation

of the kind normally seen in papers

on astronomy or atomic physics,

to describe a living process.

No-one had done anything like this.

Crucially, Turing's equations did,

for the first time,

describe how a biological system

could self-organise.

They showed that something smooth

and featureless can develop features.

One of the astonishing things

about Turing's work

was that

starting with the description

of really very simple processes

governed by very simple equations,

by putting these together,

suddenly complexity emerged.

The pattern suddenly came

out as a natural consequence.

And I think in many ways

this was very, very unexpected.

In essence, Turing's equations

described something quite familiar,

but which no-one had thought of

in the context of biology before.

Think of the way a steady wind

blowing across sand

creates all kinds of shapes.

The grains self-organise

into ripples, waves and dunes.

This happens, even though the

grains are virtually identical,

and have no knowledge of the

shapes they become part of.

Turing argued

that in a very similar way,

chemicals seeping across an embryo

might cause its cells to

self-organise into different organs.

These are Turing's own very rough

scribblings of how this might work.

They show how a completely

featureless chemical soup,

can evolve

these strange blobs and patches.

In his paper, he refined his sketches

to show how his equations could

spontaneously create markings

similar to those on

the skins of animals.

Turing went around showing people

pictures saying,

"Doesn't this look

a bit like the patterns on a cow?"

And everyone sort of went,

"What is this man on about?"

But actually,

he knew what he was doing.

They did look like the patterns

of a cow, and that's one of

the reasons why cows have this

dappled pattern or whatever.

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