Chapter VI. The Great Order

its speed calmed down and the noise of the engines subsided, it began to maneuver the mooring in the port, slowly slid to the left, and approached its starboard to the pier quietly, it lightly hit the tires on the sidewalk wall, and in a jiffy, its bridge descended, and more than three hundred passengers crowded at the gate moving out.

The townspeople are accustomed to this scene every day, nothing too exciting, they want to get out quickly to their business, many of the tourists were in such a hurry, as they want to get done with their busy schedule.

Except for Robert, he stayed upstairs watching the human wave flowing out, and within two minutes, everything stopped! The checkout process ended quickly, and hundreds of new transients began to enter.

Life in Istanbul is fast! Very fast, he struggled to walk against the tide of arrivals until he got out.

Walk right from the port’s main gate, into a wide square. There are, as everywhere in Istanbul, many hawker stalls, grilled corn, simit cakes, dates

He walked right from the main port gate, towards a wide square. And there, as in almost every place in Istanbul, are several street vendors’ stalls, barbecued corn, simit cakes, mussels, coffee, and tea.

He is supposed to meet Sheikh Ruslan here at 3:30 p.m., ten minutes to go, not enough to eat anything but a pill of simit cake.

-“Iki lira” means two liras (The currency in Turkey), the vendor said,

Robert paid five liras, left him the change, and walked by the strait.

Moments later, his phone rang. The caller – Sheikh Ruslan

-Ruslan: Hello my friend, have you arrived?

— Yes, I am in the agreed-upon place

– So am I, describe what is around you

– Many streets’ vendors

-Ruslan laughed: they are everywhere in Istanbul. Describe something else.

-He turned around: I am in a large square near the dock.

-Do you see the subway sign, the white letter “M” with red and blue background

-Yes, it’s here not far, right to my left

-Okay, stand right at the entrance door of the subway

Moments later, he felt a patted hand on his shoulder, a man in his 50s, white, with a grey beard, green eyes, thin nose, skinny body, and tall. Was wearing a white turban mixed with some red, and a gray cloak over a white robe, the timeline on his face a palette of lines that summarize the story of humans, no doubt, he is, Sheikh Ruslan.

-Robert, right?

– Yes, you are Sheikh Ruslan?

– Yes, we finally meet, it is an honor for me

– The honor is mine, sir. In fact, I did not expect that I would come, but you made me an offer, which I could not refuse.

-The sheikh giggled, patting his shoulder: We will go, do not be in rush, have you eaten?

-Thank you, I’m not hungry but eager to go.

They crossed the street to another square, Istanbul is teeming with squares, it’s everywhere, all the same, like a carbon copy. Several buses stop on the side of the road, he expected them to get on one, but it didn’t happen, they kept walking away from the port, while the Sheikh seemed like a tourist guide providing him with information about the area.

After fifteen minutes through the neighborhoods,

– are you tired? The Sheikh said,

– Robert said: No, I can walk more

Sheikh: Not today, my friend, we have arrived

He pointed his head to one of the buildings of the region, old with two floors, closed with a black iron door decorated with the ancient Ottoman font, the building was painted in light yellow, time had made its greatest law with, its cover was revealed and the original stone color appeared in random areas of it where the paint crumbled, a painting by signing chaos, the Great Order.

One of the reasons why he was so passionate about physics as a child is the motion of clouds, the way they flow through the sky creating chaotic forms, intertwining among each other with what seems to be absolute randomness, and between motion and serenity a familiar shape forms, but quickly dissipates in the midst of anarchy.

Are we random as clouds? is there some order in the midst of all this? what is it! What is the standard for measuring it? Why did this cloud take this particular shape, and how?

Many questions, and when he found a glimmer of hope for an answer, his heart clung to Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute’s pioneering science of chaos and randomness, hence science’s greatest leapfrog and study occurred.

It is called the butterfly effect, a metaphor used to express the sensitivity of any dynamic system to initial conditions, such as a butterfly flapping in China one year later causing a hurricane in the United States, or preventing another in Europe.

It is an expression of the importance of the initial states of a system, which, no matter how small and ineffectual, produce a chain of events that react and gradually magnify their impact until it becomes visible and effective.

And the initial cases, in other words, are those little, tiny details that often nobody pays attention to.

-My grandmother knows this!

That’s how Robert liked to start talking about chaos as he gave a lecture to high school students on one of his educational visits.

– In fact, everyone knew this. Perhaps a little fight going on in Paris right now between two tourists will cause a world war a year later. Big events always start with something trivial that no one has ever paid any attention to. Just give it enough time, and it will dazzle you with its impact.

Everyone knew but the physicists, and their pioneer Newton, who insisted that the results were not affected by minor differences in the initial cases: if two balloons went a path, and one went a few millimeters, they would reach the same destination by only a few millimeters. But the first one ends up in America and the second one in East Asia, because of this very slight deviation in the trajectory of one, is impossible.

And in a more social way, if you teach a child a bad word today, you are only responsible for that word, not for the 10 words that he will learn the next day, so Newton wished, while my grandmother had a different opinion, she said your word was the main reason he learned the 10 words.

This is what classical Newtonian physics wanted. My grandmother is unable to prove her point of view with a law as they can, for she depends on something inside her other than her mind, as for physicists, are hostages of their minds, Physicists are hostages to their minds, following the data and evidence, being their slaves.

They wanted to feel the ecstasy of understanding, control, and certainty, they rejected randomness and chaos, they said Newton said chaos has no place in this world, it is a world of order, of fixed laws, all we have to do is decode it and we are done with this.

I will let you with a flawless package of laws.

However, it was later discovered that the randomness of the universe is not on its periphery, but may even be the entire universe.

When the weatherman Luntz decided in 1961 to save himself some time on the calculator of weather forecasting, and since the numbers 0.506126 and 0.506 were almost the same, and the difference would have no effect, so he decided to enter the second instead of the first, as the difference was not worth printing.

He deleted 0.000126, roughly one-thousandth, from the original number! How tiny is the difference, almost negligible!

He then went out drinking coffee in the courtyard, waiting for his primeval computer to finish the expected weather results, and when he came back, he didn’t believe what his eyes saw, the weather was so different, so terribly different!

He repeated the process, and got the same results, just one-thousandth caused a complete and drastic change in the weather a few days later, and here was the beginning. My grandmother’s words were proved by scientific evidence.

Chaos science developed rapidly, and scientists began to explore the mysteries of randomness, discovering its sensible system. They soon discovered that everything in the universe had a certain point, and if it did, there was no turning back.

-Well, my grandmother also used to say that, she always said, do not reach the point of no return, and what’s broken cannot be fixed. But her only problem is that she does not have a degree in physics.

Scientists called it an entropy point, as in any dynamic system there is an entropy point, and if it plugs in, the system ends. It’s never going to be the same, and the universe wants it, wants to deliver any system to it, this universe is fighting for entropy.

The reason is, commutativity, the universal order of the universe; it hates monopolies, rejects them, and promotes reciprocity among all its components.

Just to remind you, some people always said, do not lock yourself up, you have to be sociable, get out of your room, and move on. Do you know who am I talking about?

Yeah, well done.

If you boil a jug of water, the entropy point of that system is when it starts to evaporate, you cannot accumulate steam as water back into the pitcher. Unless you use a control device to control it and recondense it over the jug.

And if you left a glass on the table, the universe would only be obsessed with destroying it, one trillionth of other cosmic premonitions, yes, it would take hundreds of years, maybe thousands of them, if the glass was steel, but at the end, it would destroy it, because the universe has a lot of tools, and it has plenty of time.

How easy it is to demolish a skyscraper, for by doing this you are in keeping with the general current of the universe, and it will support you with all its laws, but its construction? When you reverse this current! It is a different matter.

! It is a completely different matter, the universe is moving towards destruction, death, entropy, and even wants it.

Later on, pioneers emerged in cybernetics, or control science, another science that has to control randomness, that randomness that interferes with our lives and around us everywhere, shedding the sweetness of certainty, the euphoric of control.

They tried to control it.

In fact, it is not controlling in the true sense, but rather the neutralization of the harmful effect, by serval means, including strengthening the beneficial effect. The reason for this is that we are helpless in front of the magnitude of the expected causes and the possible momentary conditions in this world. We cannot enumerate all of them, let alone anticipate every form they may take in a particular circumstance, or what results from them when they are present with a number of other reasons.

Apart from any possible complexity, if I asked you to give me the number of probabilities for a one-digit password, how many would you mention?

Yes, very easy, 10. It could be 0, 1, or 2 to 9.

The equation is the number of digits (10) raised to the power (1), which is the number of digits.

Well, if I asked you to guess a password that has only two digits, the answer is 10 to the 2 power, 10 times itself twice, and it equals 100 different probabilities.

How about a 3-digit number? The number of possibilities is 10 to the power of 3 and equal to 1000, we can still guess a thousand passwords.

But what about a 9-digit password? The answer is 1 with 9 zeros in front of it, a billion possibilities! We are talking about a 9-digit password only!

Despite the magnitude of the number, computers can still guess it in a relatively acceptable time, perhaps an hour or two or ten, depending on their capacity.

But what if we allow you to use symbols and letters in this word and leave the choice open for you to choose the number of digits?!

Just as any app advises you when you create your password.

At least six digits

At least one capital letter

At least one number

At least one symbol

Do you know what it means to require at least one symbol in a password? This means that the symbols have entered the game, the number of possibilities has increased by billions more, and with the possibility of uppercase and lowercase letters, it has increased trillions more.

This means that the symbols have entered the game, the number of possibilities has increased billions extra, and with the possibility of uppercase and lowercase letters, the possibilities have increased to trillions more.

With the number of password digits left open! You can make it six, ten, or a hundred, and if you like complexity and decide to make your password something like this: anMj@#KKlkjh@wBn_-8m#678@er@09i&y

Then no computer on this planet (yet) can withstand the shock of guessing such a password.

Of course, email hackers often use other means of finding them that have nothing to do with the possibilities, such as hacking into your computer and stealing the characters while you’re typing them on your keyboard. Or by injection; by injecting an electronic link with a software sentence that hacks your connection to the Internet, and steals your password as it goes from your device to the site. Of course, that is if it was not encrypted.

Or they use guesswork, which is software that tests password probabilities, and if your password is as weak as 123456, they are more likely to succeed. But do not worry, the app programmers figured that out, and that’s why you’re not allowed to log back in for an hour or two after a number of failed logins, and that also explains why there is a random check image to make sure you’re not a robot.

In cases of bank accounts, for example, there are very high protection systems. Your account will be completely frozen when they suspect that someone is trying to hack it, and they will ask you to visit your bank branch or contact them.

All these possibilities and all this electronic war between hackers and information security experts, and superpowers, and we are still talking about the range of numbers, letters, and symbols on your computer or phone keyboard only.

Well, what about the reasons in this world, for which the flutter of a single butterfly or the twinkling of one person’s eye, the movement of your finger, a word out of your mouth, the kick of a donkey, the leap of a rabbit, a dying star, a solar explosion, a meteor colliding with another one million light-years away, all of them, a staggering number of which we don’t know about, all of them interfering, and affecting each other and the entire world.

We can’t even count them, let alone raise them to a particular power or count the probabilities of them intermingling with each other.

But if you could somehow count all the causes in the universe, then figure out the possibilities by the order they occurred and you had the tools to change their order and manipulate them, then I have to say congratulation for being the number one opponent of chaos, but I do not recommend provoking it. We are just beginning to be in mystery, and maybe what it is hiding is even greater.

Until then, we are helpless, so our most important weapon in the face of its undesirable harmful effect is to strengthen the beneficial effect, create contingency plans, and other things, think of whatever ways you want to neutralize or avoid damage of that effect. By that, you are talking about control science.

When you talk on the handset, there is some kind of interference at times; believe it or not, the manufacturers do not always know why; often it is for reasons that are not technical, that are not understandable to them, that it is random, messy, how would they know that it might be the cough of a man in Southeast Asia two months ago!

The butterfly effect is perhaps the effect of coughing here.

They strengthen the useful signal, that is, strengthen the caller’s voice, or purify the communication, to overcome unknown interference, and this is one of the most important reasons for the price difference you pay between a wireless headset (Bluetooth) for five dollars and another for three hundred dollars, its internal weapons in the face of randomness.

Of course, wired headphones are cheaper and less randomized, and you now know why, don’t you?

The reason is that the signal travels across a cheap shielded medium. This wire has saved manufacturers a lot of work and internal additions imposed by the space between your phone and your ear, so the signal travels through a protected medium, which is the wire.

Telecommunications companies reinforce their towers with anti-randomness techniques, and their job is to put the signal on your phone, but the space between your phone on the bed and your ear is not their responsibility. This space is full of reasons for you to take away the warmth of your love call and make her kisses sound like an 18th-century steam train.

Well, if you decide to make this call with a wireless handset, you should be generous in exchange for the pure sound of the kisses, and use a handset equipped with anti-impact techniques.

When we discovered this, or to be fair to others, it must be said that when we proved my grandmother’s point of view with scientific evidence, we understand why meteorologists fail to accurately predict the weather for the intermediate, as well as long, and sometimes even close periods.

So, the science of weather is based on sensors, which are planted in different parts of the planet, and they capture data about weather, wind speed, humidity, and many other things, but certainly not all of them, not the flapping of a butterfly.

They only deal with the reasons that we know and are clear enough to be measured by our current technology, and these sensors transmit data periodically to supercomputers, analyzing them using complex algorithms that predict the weather.

Scientists say if we put a sensor in one square meter of space on the globe, and we had a supercomputer that could handle the volume of data coming from it, and we knew all the causes and count them, including the cosmic ones, we would still be unable to predict the weather completely because, in the Spaces between the next square meter, there are changes and fluctuations, maybe a butterfly flapping its wings there, upending all our predictions upside down.

-But of course, if we can do this, our predictions will be much more accurate.

-the weather? complex dilemma.

-But what about tossing a coin and anticipating which face it will rest on?

You do not need an explanation, right?

Even if you throw it every time with the same force and direction, and set your hand trembling, and your physical and psychological state at this moment controlling your heartbeat, and you throw it in the same initial state you did last time, to fall in the same place on the same surface, you won’t always succeed making it land on the same face.

What would the reason be? Perhaps a boat that sailed a thousand miles a month ago caused a current, triggered a series of atmospheric reactions, caused a breath of air that had just arrived, and struck the coin as it landed.

Sitting with Christine, thinking about the chaos in her eyes, his emotional chaos, plotting to lure her out for a weekend of love, he wished in a chaotic, physical logic,” I wish I could count the number of causes and their probabilities that affect your feelings about me and that will determine what kind of answer I get if I ask you out for a date.”

-What? What is that you just said? (An internal voice).

By knowing the causes and the probabilities of the order in which they occur, you predict emotions Is that possible? Can we treat human emotions like the weather?

Are there sensors to measure our emotions across time points in our history from which we can predict our future actions and their impact on us and others? Is there a computer with enormous capacity that can collect, analyze, and predict them? Do human emotions fall within this randomness?

Throughout their history, physicists have rejected the idea of a relationship between human emotions and the surrounding world.

Emotions are incomprehensible, they cannot be expected, what cannot be expected cannot be measured, what cannot be measured cannot be formulated into equations, and what cannot be formulated into equations, screw it, reject it, get rid of it, it is not part of this world.

These ideas were acceptable to physicists in the past before we knew that we can control the effect of randomness to some extent through control sciences, and predict it by collecting a huge amount of data through special sensors and analyzing it.

What affects when a plane arrives?

Wind speed and direction? Our motors compensate for this unwanted turbulence.

A lightning strike could destroy it? Our lightning rods control this disturbance and neutralize its danger.

Running out of fuel? We have fuel meter indicators.

Engine failure? We have alternative solutions for an emergency landing.

All fall under the category of control sciences,

But what about the basic building blocks of an airplane model during its flight? Humans themselves!

A passenger suddenly felt dizzy, and felt ill, did the pilot decide to change his destination to the nearest airport?

Another angry person caused a commotion, did he cause the flight to be canceled?

Our emotions are part of this world, affect it, and can be affected by, interact with. Since we can predict chaos if we have the tools to collect, measure, and analyze it, and since we can neutralize its harmful effects through control science, thus, we can certainly do the same to human emotions as we do with weather and everything else that we have been able to predict and neutralize its undesirable effect. But would we get the desired results? nobody knows…

-“Not today, not today, Robert”, he spoke to himself.

– If you can’t do it today, you can’t do it for a lifetime, all you have to do now is simply to ask her out and let her chaos of feelings take you wherever she wants.

Unconsciously, about to make the request, his phone rang, the caller being his mother and the destination being Tel Aviv.

Standing next to Sheikh Ruslan at the building door, this wall fascinated him.

-The universe worked in some parts of its paint even to the point of entropy, which it broke, so it painted a very beautiful painting, signed by its greatest law, randomness.

If Van Gogh was here, he would not have a nicer one.

Sheikh Ruslan knocked on the door, they heard the sound of footsteps behind him, someone opened a small window from it, as soon as he saw the Sheikh until he closed it immediately, then there was a rattle in the stillness of the alley, iron locks opening.

Here Robert booked a front-row seat for the night with the absurd, illogic and subconscious.