Synchronization - A natural phenomenon pt.1

The second law of thermodynamics tends to tell us that everything in the universe tends towards disorder and in complex systems, chaos is the norm. So you naturally expect the universe to be messy and yet we can observe occasions of spontaneous order -The perfectly timed orbits of the moon, the simultaneous flashes of fireflies and even the regular beating of your heart.

Welcome to the phenomenon of Synchronization widely known as 'Synchronization of chaos'. I will be talking about some of the phenomena of this theory and will be dividing the post into parts, so let's start with our 1st phenomenon

Pendulum clock

The 17th century Dutch Astronomer Christiaan Huygens created 1st working pendulum. The goal was to help sailors know their location concerning time as his pendulum clock was accurate close to 10-15 sec at that time. Now being homesick at a voyage he observed that two of his pendulum clock hang side by side which were out of phase at first observation now came at the same phase i.e were having motion in the same direction. Being confused he out phased one of the pendulums but in the span of a half-hour, both would come in the same phase. Which in itself was a confusing and unanswered concept at that time.

This proved that synchronization was more or less, contact and short-ranged phenomenon. To conclude the observation of Christiaan we can say, Synchronization of chaos is a phenomenon that may occur when two, or more, dissipative chaotic systems are coupled.

To keep this post short and informative we will be discussing its other cases in upcoming posts.