Steady Energy Flows Can Create Patterns
J.X. Mason May 12, 2025 No Comments
Steady Energy Flows Can Create Patterns
Meaningful Information consists of items arranged in Patterns. The arranged items can be anything — atoms, molecules, digits, letters, acorns, checkers, species of plants, books of law, or pencil dots.
Nature’s Continuing Creation, which I sometimes call “The Growing, Organizing, Direction of the Cosmos,” tends to create Patterns of increasing complexity, organization, and even beauty over time.
Patterns occur everywhere in Nature, including cracks, spots, stripes, bubbles, foam, waves, (and sand dunes), meanders, spirals, fractals, tilings (a.k.a. tessellations), Widmanstatten Patterns (a.k.a. Thomson Structures), spots, stripes, branches, webs, and symmetries.
The Continuing Natural Creation of Complexity will happen if there is an open flow-through of energy and a suitable environment of component parts and/or symbols. When the patterns are three-dimensional physical objects, we call them structures. When the parts of the structures move and do things, we call them systems.
An excellent article on Wikipedia, “Patterns in Nature,” explains how natural patterns arise and provides wonderful photographs of them.