There is, in the world, a natural drive towards unity. Even inanimate objects tend to lean in this direction. In 1665, Christiaan Huygens, the inventor of the pendulum clock, was ill in bed when he noticed that two of his pendulum clocks, hanging side by side, oscillated together without variance. Even when he interrupted the swing of the pendulums, within a half an hour they were once again swinging in synchrony.
Synchrony is not a rare occurrence in the world. In the words of Steven Strogatz, the author of the book, Sync – the emerging science of spontaneous order,
At the heart of the universe is a steady, insistent beat: the sound of cycles in sync. It pervades nature at every scale from the nucleus to the cosmos…thousands of fireflies congregate in the mangroves and flash in unison, without any leader or cue from the environment. Trillions of electrons march in lockstep in a superconductor, enabling electricity to flow…In the solar system, gravitational synchrony can eject huge boulders out of the asteroid belt and towards Earth…Even our bodies are symphonies of rhythm, kept alive by the relentless, coordinated firing of thousands of pacemaker cells in our hearts. In every case, these feats of synchrony occur spontaneously, almost as if nature had an eerie yearning for order.
What everybody needs to know about unity is that the natural orientation of everything is in this direction.
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Related articles
- Heartbeat synchrony between performer and crowd – emotional resonance (mindblog.dericbownds.net)
- Nothing But The Facts – Christiaan Huygens (brighthub.com)
- Steven Strogatz – How Things in nature tend to Sync Up – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSNrKS-sCE0
