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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is, getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is, getting a new one put up in its place. I'm Akilah Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 is about both of those things.
As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people.
Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Champs podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Swae Lee. Do you realize how legendary you are?
I appreciate that. I be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got like so much more to do. Like Prince, he dropped like 30 albums. We dropped like five right now. That's the rate we got to be going.
Yeah, that's a good attitude. No matter the era, Drink Champs brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Champs from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chapter 2: How did historical views on determinism influence scientific thought?
Are you crazy? I don't think it was great. Oh, it was so imaginative. I thought it was okay. It was, uh, like a Lovecraftian thing in outer space.
Yeah.
Loved it. It was alright. I Lovecrafted it. Yeah. I liked it. Um, that's what I think of when I think of chaos. You know, there's that one part where they kind of give you like a glimpse behind like the dimension that this action is taking place in. Yeah. To see the chaos underneath. Oh, I should check that out again.
I think about Jurassic Park and Jeff Goldblum as the creep, Dr. Malcolm explaining chaos in the little auto-driving SUV or whatever that was. That's what it was called in the script, the auto-driving SUV scene. Yeah, and you know what? I actually re-watched that scene and it confirmed two things.
One is that he actually did a pretty decent job for a Hollywood movie of a very rudimentary explanation of chaos.
Yeah.
Oh, you watched it for this?
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, just that scene.
Yeah. And then it also confirmed of what a creep that character was. Yeah. If you watch that scene, he's like... he was all gross and flirty with her right in front of her ex. But he's talking to her, I didn't even notice this at first. He just touches her hair out of nowhere for no reason. He's just talking to her and he just grabs her hair and touches it. And I'm like, what a creep.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the N-body problem in chaos theory?
Right, right. So if you can figure out how a system works, mathematically speaking, right? Yeah. You can go in and plug in whatever coordinates you want to. Yeah. And watch it go. You can predict what the outcome's going to be. And what this is, it's based on what at the time was a totally revolutionary idea.
Initially, I think Descartes was the first one to kind of say cause and effect is a pretty big part of our universe, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, it was sort of like where, this is 1600s, where early science met philosophy. Right. They kind of complemented one another as far as something that's, we're talking about determinism. Right, so that was kind of the seeds of determinism was the scientific revolution, and like you said, where philosophy and science came together in the form of Descartes, right? Yeah.
And then Newton came along, and we did a whole episode on him. Yeah, January of this year. That was a good one. It was really good. I think you said in that episode that there's possibly no scientist that's changed the world more than Newton has. Maybe. He's got legs. People shouted out others in email, but I'll just say he's near the top. For sure. With some other people. The cream. Yeah.
So Newton came along and Newton said. That was his name, Isaac the Cream Newton. Right. I think. Anytime he dunked, he'd be like, cream. Yeah. You just got creamed. Oh, I thought he was a boxer. He's a basketball player. He was much more well-known as a boxer, but he definitely could dunk as a b-baller. So, man, that threw me off a little bit. That's right, the cream.
Yeah, the cream comes along, and he basically says, watch this, dudes, this cause and effect thing you're talking about, I can express it in quantifiable terms. and he comes up with all of these great laws. And basically sets the stage, the foundation for science for the next three centuries or so.
Yeah, these laws that were so rock solid and powerful that scientists kind of got ahead of themselves a little and said, we're done. Done. With Newton's laws, we can predict everything if we have a good enough beginning accurate value to plug into his equations. And they weren't, I think there was a little hubris and a little just excitement about like, well, we figured it all out.
Right, that you could take Newton's laws, and if you had accurate enough measurements, you could predict what the outcome would be of that system that you plug those measurements into using this formula, right?
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Chapter 4: How did Edward Lorenz contribute to our understanding of chaos?
One Love. Wow. I literally filmed in his apartment in Queensbridge. His moms were still up in that apartment. Noms was just beginning to take off. His pops used to live near me in Harlem. His dad introduced him to a whole lot of, you know, conscious stuff, and he made a young prodigy.
No matter the era, Drink Champs brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Champs from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, Chuck, we're back. So there's some issues, right, with determinism. There's some weird problems out there that are saying like, hey, pay attention to me because I'm not sure determinism works.
Right.
And one is the end body problem. Yeah, how this came about was in 1885, there was King Oscar number two of Sweden and Norway.
Yeah. Yeah.
Don't want to leave out Norway. Both. He said, you know what? Let's offer a prize to anyone who can prove the stability of the solar system. Yeah. Something that has been stable for a long time before that. And a lot of the most brilliant minds on planet Earth got together and tried to do this with mathematical proofs. And no one could do it. And then a dude named Henri.
You've got to help me there with that last name. Fonkarei. Ooh, say the whole thing. Henri Poincaré. Very nice. He was French, believe it or not. And he was a mathematician, and he said, you know what, I'm not gonna look at this big picture of all the planets in the sun and all their orbits. You'd have to be a fool to try that.
Sure, he said, I'm gonna shrink this down, like we talked about, shrinking that initial value. Right. Yeah. And that initial condition, he shrunk it down. He said, I'm going to look at just a couple of bodies orbiting one another with a common center of gravity. And I'm going to look at this. And this was called the in-body problem.
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Chapter 5: What is the butterfly effect and why is it important?
Oh, that was the password.
Yeah. I guess I was too young to understand what a password was. Yeah. Okay. There weren't passwords at the time.
No.
And you just shouted it at the computer, and they were like, okay, access granted.
Yeah.
Still, that movie holds up. Does it really? Oh, totally. I gotta check it out. Yeah, still very, very fun. Young Ally Sheedy, boy, I had a crush on her from that movie. She was great. Yeah. What else was she in recently? Wasn't she in something? Well, I mean, she kind of went away for a while and then had her big comeback with that indie movie High Art, but that was a while ago.
Has she been in anything else recently? Sure. I think I saw her in something recently and I didn't realize that was her.
Oh, really?
She looks familiar. I was like, oh, that's Ally Sheedy. I don't know. All right. I could look it up, but I won't. It doesn't matter. Anyway, I still crush on her. So the Royal McBee was not quite the Whopper. You could actually sit down at it. The Royal McBee? That's the name of it. That sounds like a hamburger too. It was by the Royal Typewriter Company. And they got into computers for a second.
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Chapter 6: How does the concept of attractors relate to chaos theory?
The Royal McBee. and I'm gonna get a printout so you can visualize what this looks like. So things were going well and he had this printout and everyone was amazed because these calculations never seem to repeat themselves. He was making like word art. You remember that? That was the first thing anybody did on a computer was to make word art, like a butterfly or something.
Right, you would print out, yeah, I never could do that. I couldn't either. Like you have to be able to visualize things spatially. You have to have that right kind of brain for that. Right, or you have to be following a guidebook that tells you how to do it. True. Have you ever seen Me, You, and Everyone We Know? No. Yeah, I love that movie. That's a great movie.
Those little kids in there, they were doing that. Oh, yeah, yeah. The forever back and forth poop. Well, I haven't seen that since it came out. It's been a while. Oh, you've got to see it again. Yeah. Great movie. Good movie. Ally Sheedy's not in it. No. It's Miranda July. Right. And she wrote and directed too, right? She did a great job. It was her show. It's one of those rare movies where...
there's just the right amount of whimsy. Because whimsy so easily overpowers everything else and becomes like, bleh. Yeah, yeah. This is like the most perfectly balanced amount of whimsy I've ever seen in a movie. Yeah, if there's too much whimsy, I just like Garden State. I just want to punch it in the face. Terrible. Although I like Garden State, but I haven't seen it since it came out.
It hasn't aged well.
Yeah.
It's just, when you look at it now, it's just so cutesy and whimsical. Oh, yeah. It's like, oh, come on. Yeah. Boy, we're getting to a lot of movies today. Oh, yeah. We're stalling. We haven't even talked about Butterfly Effect yet, which is coming. It is. I'm dreading it. That's why I'm stalling. All right, so where were we?
He was running his calculations, printing out his values so people could see it. And then he got a little lazy one day in 1961. This output, he noticed, was interesting. So he said, you know, I'm going to repeat this calculation, see it again, but I'm going to, to save time, I'm just going to kind of pick up in the middle And I'm not going to input as many numbers.
But I'm still using the same values, just I'm not going out to six decimal points. So the printout he had went to three decimal points. Yeah. So he was working from the printout and didn't take into account that the computer accepted six decimal points. So he was just putting in three. Correct. And expecting that the outcome would be the same, right? Yes, but the outcome was way different. Right.
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Chapter 7: What role do supercomputers play in studying chaotic systems?
Yeah, and when you say things were going all over, if you look at the graph, it's not just lines going in straight lines bouncing all over the place randomly. There was an order to it, but the lines were not on top of one another. Let's say you draw a figure eight with your pencil, and then you continue drawing that figure eight.
It's going to slip outside those curves every time unless you're a robot. Sure. And that's what it ended up looking like. Yeah, yeah. It never retraced the same path twice, ever. It had a lot of really surprising properties. And at the time, it just fell completely outside the understanding of science, right? Yeah.
Luckily, this happened to Lorenz, who was curious enough to be like, what is going on here? And again, he sat down and started to do the math and thinking about this, and especially how it applied to the weather, right? Yeah. And he came up with something very famous. Yes. Yes, the butterfly effect. A, this thing kinda looked like butterfly wings a little bit.
And B, when he went to present his findings, he basically had the notion, he's like, I'm gonna wow these people in the crowd in 1972. It's a conference that I'm going to. And I'm gonna say something like, the seagull flaps its wings and it starts a small turbulence that can affect weather on the other side of the world. a small little thing will just grow and grow and snowball and affect things.
And he had a colleague who was like, eh, seagull wings, that's nice. And he said, how about this? And this is the title they ended up with. Predictability, colon, does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? And everyone was like, whoa. Whoa. Minds blown. Yeah. Should we take a break? Yes. All right, we'll be right back.
Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges.
I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.
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Mainstream media is full of cruel depictions of the unhoused, stories that shame and blame and paint the unhoused as a monolith. We The Unhoused is the podcast that's changing that. I'm Theo Henderson, creator and host, and for years I've created a space where the unhoused and their advocates can tell their own stories. In the last few months alone, I've interviewed unhoused parents,
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Chapter 8: How has chaos theory changed our understanding of the universe?
Okay.
And the grocery store guy says, well, there's only 7,000 people here. We need 8,000 people living here to make a profit. So I'm shutting down this grocery store.
Mm-hmm.
Then all of a sudden you have demand for groceries. So things go on for a little while and someone comes in and say, hey, this town needs a grocery store. They build a grocery store. They can't sustain. They shut down. Someone else comes along because of the demand. And it is this search for equilibrium
this dynamic well you reach equilibrium here and there as the store opens periods of stability periods of stability and that dynamic equilibrium is called a strange attractor so an attractor is the state which a system settles on stranger attractor is the trajectory on which it never settles down but tries to reach the equilibrium with periods of stability man Does that make sense?
That Bible-based explanation was dynamite. I understand it better than I did before. And I understood it okay before. That's great. Surely you can add. Yeah? Yeah. No, you're going to add to it? No. That's it? No. I mean, like, yeah, an attractor is where if you graph something and eventually it reaches equilibrium, it's a regular attractor.
If it never reaches equilibrium, it's constantly trying to and has periods of stability, strange attractor. I can't top that. All right. Grocery store, small town. That was great. So Lorenz's strange attractor was named a Lorenz attractor, named after him. Big deal. They weren't using the word chaos yet. No, but he published that paper about butterfly wings, right? Yeah. The butterfly effect.
And it, coupled with his picture, the picture of a strange attractor, which is almost the, aside from fractals, almost the emblem or the logo for chaos theory, the Lorenz attractor is. Yeah. It got attention off the bat. It wasn't like Poincaré's findings where it got neglected for 70 years.
Almost immediately, everybody was talking about this because, again, what Lorenz had uncovered, which is the same thing that Poincaré had uncovered, is that determinism is possibly based on an illusion.
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