Law and disorder

摘要

We humans prefer the tidy to the untidy, the ordered to the disordered. We like pristine geometrical regularity, and eschew what is erratic and irregular. We want predictability and, more than anything, we want control. In these confusing times, it might seem as if we have little power over anything. Instead of letting it get us down, though, perhaps we should take comfort from the work of Dirk Helbing, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Helbing has been studying the movement of tens of thousands of cars on road networks; the workings of vast webs of interacting machines on factory floors; and other systems, where the complexity of what happens and why routinely defeats the human mind.