Out of Chaos. Louis J. Halle.

Out of Chaos
Louis J. Halle
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1977.

Why read it? Explains the apparent contradiction between accident in the foundations of matter and order in its developed form, between molecules bouncing from one to another like pinballs and a full-grown human being. A work that unites the two cultures, science and art. In science, history and contemporary affairs, the closer our perspective, the more chaotic things appear to be; the wider and broader our perspective, the more ordered things appear to be. One product of specialized knowledge is fragmented knowledge. “I conclude that the only thing for us to do is to continue to enlarge our vision as much as we can; then we shall see.” The author applies this principle to individual lives, suggesting that the details of one’s life might seem chaotic, but what counts is the whole.

Some sample ideas from the book: The answers to our questions today in science are mathematical and therefore abstract, and therefore cannot be understood in terms of experience or visualized. “A world of four dimensions that we are incapable of visualizing, although we can define it in the abstract language of mathematics; a mathematical description of reality may not be uncertain on its own terms, but the impossibility of giving it meaning in terms that fit our experience of the sensible world leaves us in the position of someone whose questions are met with answers that, however true, cannot be translated into terms that have meaningful reality.” “Mathematics can give us quite definite information about what we cannot see or even picture in our imaginations.” “Our comprehension of physical reality has moved beyond what we can visualize into a world of mathematical formulas—and that mathematical world has become divorced altogether from what we can visualize.”

The only absolute law in the universe is that no object can be accelerated beyond the speed of light; all the rest are a matter of probability. “As our vision continues to widen, concepts that now seem irreconcilably contradictory will be reconciled within the larger terms of more comprehensive concepts based on more comprehensive views.” “…being, generally, is orderly in the large and disorderly in the detail….” “Development of a meaningful order as we go from small to large.” “I invoked the Principle of Complementarity to justify the equal validity of concepts that seem mutually opposed; here I apply it to examples of one reality viewed in different perspectives, or to different partial views of one reality. Two photographs of one mountain, showing it from the north and south respectively appear to represent two different realities, whereas they are equally valid and complementary views of one reality.”

“The lives we know directly as experience of the here-and-now, represent chaos in the absence of a context.” “The broader the perspective of civilizations, the greater the appearance of order; the narrower the perspective, the greater the incidence of accident.” “Every true tragedy leaves in the mind when it is over, a suggestion that in some larger sense the defeat was really a victory; when all is over we find ourselves uplifted rather than depressed.” “It has that tranquility of an inevitable ending which is the mark of tragedy." “May we not say categorically that all forms of art imitate the irregularity within regularity that characterizes living nature?” “A work of art expands in the mind.” “The arts liberate us from imprisonment in the here-and-now: we feel our lives extended beyond their span, we become part of something larger than ourselves.”

Quotes: “This day-to-day world appears to be largely capricious…. Order is what we perceive as the beautiful.” “Order is built on an underlying chaos….” “Mind is a conscious faculty for deliberately creating order.” “The paradox that, although one’s life seems unrewarding in detail, it may turn out to be profoundly rewarding as a whole.” “What counts is the life of the individual as a whole; its fleeting instants are of no consequence.”