fractalnavel

so there was a bit of an ice-fall overnight, you know, the freezing rain that coats things & makes them pretty - and sometimes break.  no breaks around here (although i did have to patch up the back porch awning due to a branch that fell sometime in the last couple of weeks - fiberglass is amazing stuff).

i noticed the wires out front with their ice coating, and numerous little icicles suspended from them.  kind of reminded me of histograms.  or those “how many bars” commercials of that cell phone company.  but looking at them a little longer, there seemed to be a certain distribution of sizes and locations.  there's not much curve to these particuaar hanging wires, or else i suppose there would have been an overall distribution of average lengths due to water flowing to lower parts.  a sort of modulation effect.

of course, irregularities would significantly affect these considerations, as a glance at the ice on the neighboring pines easily confirms.  and i suppose length of growth period and and distribution of water source also affects the overall distribution.  think of the season-long growth of ice that occurs in cold wet areas - like northern michigan.

but to understand such things, one needs to go the opposite direction and consider simplified systems rather than all the complexities that can be present (although recognizing the complexities or perturbing factors allows them to be eliminated).  so what about ice hanging off of uniform lines in a uniform mist of water ?  well, there's gravity, and the line itself, which provide added complexity.  ok, what about uniform mists of supercooled water in zero-g ?  at this point the forces present are only thermal motion (think brownian), the negligible inter-droplet gravitation, and molecular forces - surface tension.  so then the task is to characterize the subsequent formation of water globules over time, and describe this in terms of entropy, among other things.

and it occurs to me - this must have been very similar to the formation of the universe, in principal, if not in the particulars.  does a uniform distribution represent a high or low entropic state ?  what about the subsequent aggregation of particles ?  relative to what baseline ?  are not all arrangements an expression of order, whether the individuals are distinguishable or not ?

and this is what we are.