Steven Strogatz: How things in nature tend to sync up

http://www.ted.com Mathematician Steven Strogatz shows how flocks of creatures (like birds, fireflies and fish) manage to synchronize and act as a unit -- when no one's giving orders. The powerful tendency extends into the realm of objects, too.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

• Category

  Science & Technology

[HuckleberrySlim]

I like that fourth rule, its simple. easy to remember

[PMeekums]

@oathme420

no energy can't be created or destroyed, but matter can be made from energy and when destroyed it gives off energy, none is lost in the creation or destruction hence energy can't be created or destroyed

[samala51]

The clip of he birds and fish in synchrony was beautiful.

[1pinosos1]

that metronome argument was very week. they did not sync up they simply fell in an out of phase as their similar frequencies oscillated. they are in an endless cycle of being in phase and then out of phase in a periodically repeating pattern

[Shalini Chauhan]

Kuramoto model for Synchronization !!

[Anh Nguyen]

didn't napoleon and his troops know about this back then?

[KarlBonner1982]

I wonder how the phenomenon of spontaneous synchronization applies to a DJ rocking the crowd on a dance floor? Are there similar positive feedback loops to what happened when people started walking funny on the Millennium Bridge?

[fastforward3000]

first half a video was interesting, second half boring

[MaestroAlvis]

This is so fucking cool. My family catches bait fish, which hang out in large swarms. My dad was always sure that there must be some kind of hierarchy, with senior bait fish coordinating smaller bait fish. We would argue about this once a week or so and I never thought it had to be so complicated.

Those three rules don't sound too hard to implement in a program. Find your nearest neighbors with a Voronoi diagram, and model distances and orientation as springs. Then it's just finding constants.

[el0sidewinder]

don't you think that his book is a bit too informal. He seems to be more interested in jumping straight to the examples, instead of firmly establishing the theory. This book is good for generating interest in the subject, but I found Arrowsmith's to be slightly better.

[Jim Haroldson]

Sweet!  :D I'm a grad student in math too.

[fionamb83]

That book is single handedly getting me through my masters! It's an absolute gem. So well written and easy to understand. So many of the other books are written in a really complicated way. We were told just to work off the lecture notes, I was so happy when I stumbled across it. Doing my thesis on chaos and control of chaos now.