Our porridge is just so, a fraction hotter or colder and we we would not be here.
So the argument goes there must have been and intelligent designer to this to be so.
But how is the porridge on the billions of other planets/universes stretching into infinity?
The flagship sand pile is an attempt to show that an intelligent designer is not required.
The flagship example of self-organised criticality is the humble sandpile. Imagine that grains of sand are dropped one by one onto a flat surface. The situation is not exciting at first, with each grain staying pretty much where it lands, but in time a pile will form, and eventually new grains will trigger avalanches of various sizes.
So the argument goes there must have been and intelligent designer to this to be so.
But how is the porridge on the billions of other planets/universes stretching into infinity?
The flagship sand pile is an attempt to show that an intelligent designer is not required.
The flagship example of self-organised criticality is the humble sandpile. Imagine that grains of sand are dropped one by one onto a flat surface. The situation is not exciting at first, with each grain staying pretty much where it lands, but in time a pile will form, and eventually new grains will trigger avalanches of various sizes.
What impresses Bak about the sandpile is that the grains of sand build up to their own ‘critical’ state, without external guidance. In the beginning, the system is simple, since the grains do not interact, but as they fall they build their own structure, which eventually behaves in complex ways. The resulting pattern of avalanches is also important. Unsurprisingly, there will be fewer large ones than small ones, but Bak claims that the distribution will obey a theoretically significant ‘power law’, the simplest form of which would have the number of avalanches inversely proportional to their size.
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