Heroes Not Zombies

Aix en Provence is a city of fountains. There are dozens of them throughout the town. This one, in the Cours Mirabeau, is a simple bubbling up of water in the middle of a round basin. It’s not a dramatic spray or jet of water, but I love it. I can sit and watch the patterns on the surface of this water for ages. They are mesmerising.

At first, you could have the impression that there is one main point of activity, where the water emerges from the bottom of the basin, sending out concentric rings of ripples towards the outer edges of the fountain. They look like the rings inside a tree, and they remind me of how a small action spreads its effects over the whole body of water.

But, you don’t have to look terribly closely to notice that there is more than one centre of action in this fountain. I’ve zoomed in on just one of the several points where the water bubbles up onto the surface. Up in the top left of the image you can see some of the ripples which are clearly coming from another source. Those ripples interlace themselves with the ones from the centre focus, reminding me of a lesson I learned in school when we were studying waves – it’s called “interference” – two concentric circles of waves meeting each other, with two peaks creating a big peak, two troughs creating a deeper trough, and peaks and troughs cancelling each other out when they meet in the same time and space. It’s a beautiful pattern and you’ll be familiar with it.

This image of “interference” from two sets of ripples already demonstrates the beauty of interaction and complexity. It reminds me of the “attractors” we see in all complex systems, and also reminds me that “attractors” do not necessarily pull everything towards them the way the pole of a magnet does. Rather, they are organisational centres, influencing the structures and patterns of the environments in which they exist.

But, wait a moment, we aren’t done. Look a bit closer and you see a number of smaller circles dotted across the larger pattern of the concentric circles. Each of these is caused by a drop of water falling from higher up in the fountain, or from a splash which releases a few water molecules from the mass, a few molecules which fly through the air, then fall onto the surface a short distance from their origin. Look how each of those circles enhances the beauty and complexity of the overall pattern.

In the real world, in the natural world, there is no such thing as simple cause and effect. Everything which happens, occurs within an interconnected web of events, influences and forces. There is always this interplay. There is always this complex beauty which renders the future unpredictable.

What we experience, our health, our illnesses, our joys, delights, our sorrows and pains, are always multi-factorial, always complex in origin, always multiply connected. We pull out some of the threads, focus on some of the events and factors, and create a story which helps us to make sense of what we experiencing. that story is necessarily always complex, always changing, always developing.

I read a passage written by Umberto Eco the other day –

Per ogni problema complesso esiste una soluzione semplice. Ed è sbagliata. (For every complex problem there’s a simple solution. And it’s always wrong.)