Look at that. Isn’t that beautiful? Doesn’t it look chaotic, and yet strangely elegant?

This is the path of a double pendulum.

Small changes, such as changing the angle between the two pendulums when released, would generate a gratuitous amount of widely different pathways. The end result is extremely sensitive to initial conditions.

Now the thing that strikes me is how aesthetically beautiful this is. I think this is because our minds are actually capable of making sense of it. We can see that it isn’t absolutely random chaos- there’s a certain pattern to it. If we had the original formula, we could generate it. It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, it reads like a Murakami narrative. It’s like a beautiful piece of music, of poetry, of dance.

This is where art meets science, in my view. Complexity. Chaos. Elegance. I can’t quite express it properly yet but I hope you can see what I’m getting at.