And connecting dots makes me think of Something VERY cool I’ve been reading, trying hard to be worthy of — Dr. PF Henshaw’s creative science and math thinking site. Connecting dots is part of it along with the all-important idea that we create meaning by what we pay attention to (and don’t) and how we organize it all into mental images and complex systems, human events as well as the meaning of nature and physics itself.

It’s called “The Physics of Happening” and it has a jolly “notepad for dummies” although I warn you even that is geared to very smart dummies, if my quizzical brow furrows are any indication of the challenge level . . .

It starts with this, which I imagine sounds the way I sound
once I get going:

It’s often very hard to identify what’s what in nature. There are just too many things taking place with overlapping causes and results. It’s a problem.

Coherent individual whole systems do co-exist, overlap and intermingle, like the mingled systems of ecologies, or the untraceable cross fertilization of ideas in a new school of thought, but more than you’d think can be localized and individually identified by their characteristic dynamics of change. It’s displayed in the shapes of their curves of change over time. They include storms, sparks, our own reflexes and thoughts, social movements, the growth to failure of great plagues and misguided civilizations, cosmic explosions and life.

It’s a group of phenomena that includes everything in the macroscopic world that begins and ends. It’s surprising, but I think reasonably simple to demonstrate, that the growth of complex systems is the source of everything that is eventful around and within us.

Do they have any meaning independent of human questions and beliefs?
I’ll stretch a lot of words but ‘meaning’ seems clearly to be an internal property of the minds that create it and the communities that share it, though no doubt it’s meaningful to say there’s quite a bit of reality we’re missing.

Then here’s what PF Henshaw says therein about connecting the dots.

Dots
Finding continuous patterns of change over time is the main subject, and this means drawing curves. One of the most curious features of nature is that all apparent curves, when looked at closely, are made of ‘dots’, the ink on the page as well as the data and the physical subject it refers to, presenting a total discontinuity!

Yet there is continuity, but not seamless like in mathematics, and whether there are connections in nature or not, only the connections between the dots, that we make, allow us to see it.

This connected and disjointed character of nature and information can be genuinely confusing. It would appear that the full appreciation of this fact is not even quite dawning on the scientific community, still uncomfortable, after a hundred years, about the failure of classical determinism. We still rely on it heavily, and find it difficult if not impossible to emulate the order in events that nature so amply demonstrates using random variables in nonlinear mathematical models.

The position taken here is that continuity is not violated by discontinuity, that nature is not math. It’s different.

[JJ's note - don't you just LOVE that?? ]

This is a little like the confusion physicists have about the wave-particle nature of light. It doesn’t seem to make any sense, and part of the fun is that the concept encourages you to think ‘forbidden’ thoughts, like that the connections exist only when you make them. . .

‘Connecting the dots’ to find useful patterns, is a subject of literally every task and discipline. . . a form of imaging . . . Good images, though, make for good questions, and that is the object.

Nance