The Secret Life of Chaos Page #2

So, an area where mathematics

had never been used before,

pattern formation in biology,

animal markings,

suddenly the door was opened

and we could see

that mathematics might be

useful in that sort of area.

So even though Turing's exact

equations are not the full story,

they are the first piece of

mathematical work that showed

there was any possibility

of doing this kind of thing.

Of course, we now know

that morphogenesis

is much more complicated than the

process Turing's equations describe.

In fact, the precise mechanism of how

DNA molecules in our cells interact

with other chemicals, is still

fiercely debated by scientists.

But Turing's idea that whatever

is going on is, deep down,

a simple mathematical process,

was truly revolutionary.

I think Alan Turing's paper

is probably the cornerstone

in the whole idea of how

morphogenesis works.

What it does is it provides

us with a mechanism,

something that Darwin didn't,

for how pattern emerges.

Darwin, of course, tells us

that once you have a pattern

and it is coded for in the genes,

that may or may not be passed on,

depending on circumstances.

But what it doesn't do

is explain where that pattern

comes from in the first place.

That's the real mystery.

And so, what Turing had done

was to suddenly provide

an accessible chemical mechanism

for doing this. That was amazing.

Turing was onto a really big,

bold idea.

But sadly, we can only speculate

how his extraordinary mind

would have developed his idea.

Shortly after his groundbreaking

paper on morphogenesis,

a dreadful and completely

avoidable tragedy destroyed his life.

After his work

breaking codes at Bletchley Park,

you might well have assumed that

Turing would have been honoured

by the country

he did so much to protect.

This couldn't be

further from the truth.

What happened to him after the war

was a great tragedy,

and one of the most shameful episodes

in the history of British science.

The same year Turing

published his morphogenesis paper,

he had a brief affair

with a man called Arnold Murray.

The affair went sour

and Murray was involved in

a burglary at Turing's house.

But when Turing reported

this to the police,

they arrested him as well as Murray.

In court, the prosecution argued

that Turing, with his university

education, had led Murray astray.

He was convicted of gross indecency.

The judge then offered Turing

a dreadful choice.

He could either go to prison,

or sign up to a regime of

female hormone injections

to cure him of his homosexuality.

He chose the latter, and it was to

send him into a spiral of depression.

On 8 June 1954, Turing's

body was found by his cleaner.

He'd died the day before

by taking a bite from an apple

he'd laced with cyanide,

ending his own life.

Alan Turing died aged just 41.

The loss to science is incalculable.

Turing would never know

that his ideas would inspire

an entirely new mathematical

approach to biology,

and that scientists would

find equations like his

really do explain many of the shapes

that appear on living organisms.

Looking back, we now know

Turing had really grasped the idea

that the wonders of creation are

derived from the simplest of rules.

He had, perhaps unexpectedly,

taken the first step

to a new kind of science.

The next step in the story was

just as unexpected,

and in many ways,

just as tragic as Turing's.

In the early 1950s, around the time

of Turing's seminal paper

on morphogenesis, a brilliant

Russian chemist by the name of

Boris Belousov

was beginning his own investigations

into the chemistry of nature.

Deep behind the iron curtain, in a

lab at the Soviet Ministry of Health,

he was beginning to investigate

the way our bodies

extract energy from sugars.

Just like Turing, Belousov was

working on a personal project, having

just finished a distinguished career

as a scientist in the military.

In his lab, Belousov had formulated

a mixture of chemicals

to mimic one part of the process

of glucose absorption in the body.

The mix of chemicals sat on

the lab bench in front of him,

clear and colourless

while being shaken.

As he mixed in the final chemical,

the whole solution changed colour.

Now this isn't

particularly remarkable.

If we mix ink into water,

it changes colour.

But then something happened

that made no sense at all.

The mixture began to go clear again.

Belousov was astounded.

Chemicals can mix together and react.

But they shouldn't be able

to go back on themselves,

to apparently

unmix without intervention.

You can change from a clear

mixture to a coloured mixture, fine.

But surely not back again?

And it got weirder.

Belousov's chemicals didn't just

spontaneously go into reverse.

They oscillated.

They switched back and forth

from coloured to clear,

as if they were being driven by some

sort of hidden chemical metronome.

With meticulous care, he repeated

his experiments again and again.

It was the same every time.

His mixture would cycle from clear to

coloured and back again, repeatedly.

He'd discovered something

that was almost like magic,

a physical process that seemed to

violate the laws of nature.

'Convinced he'd discovered something

of great importance, Belousov

'wrote up his findings, keen to share

his discovery with the wider world.

'But when he submitted his paper to a

leading Russian scientific journal,

'he received a wholly

unexpected and damning response.'

The editor of the journal told

Belousov that his findings in the lab

were quite simply impossible.

They contravened

the fundamental laws of physics.

The only explanation

was that Belousov had made a mistake

in his experiment, and the work

was simply not fit for publication.

'The rejection crushed Belousov.

'Deeply insulted by the suggestion

his work had been botched,

'he abandoned his experiments.

'Soon he gave up science altogether.'

The tragic irony was that, divided

as they were by the Iron Curtain,

Belousov never encountered

Turing's work.

For if he had, he would have

been completely vindicated.

It turns out that Belousov's

oscillating chemicals,

far from contravening

the laws of physics,

were actually a real world example

of precisely the behaviour

Turing's equations predicted.

While the connection might not

appear obvious at first sight,

other scientists showed

that if you left a variation

of Belousov's chemicals,

unstirred in a Petri dish,

instead of simply oscillating,

they self-organise into shapes.

In fact, they go beyond

Turing's simple blobs and stripes

to create stunningly

beautiful structures and patterns

out of nowhere.

The amazing and very unexpected

thing about the BZ reaction

is that someone

had discovered a system

which essentially reproduces

the Turing equations.

And so, from what looks like

a very, very bland solution

emerge these astonishing patterns

of waves and scrolls and spirals.

Now this is emphatically not

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