NATURE’S

PATTERNS

Philip Ball is a science writer, and the author of many popular science books
including H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth, Critical Mass (winner of the
2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books) and The Music Instinct. He lectures
widely and has contributed to magazines and newspapers, including Nature, New
Scientist, The Guardian, and The New York Times.
 NATURE’S
PATTERNS
A Tapestry in Three Parts

PHILIP BALL

Nature’s Patterns is a trilogy composed of

Shapes, Flow, and Branches
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
 BRANCHING

Seeing the splayed, forking channels of rivers, natural philosophers were

reminded of veins and arteries. These in turn speak of trees—and why not, for all
are networks that distribute vital fluids. What are the rules that make branches?
Why does a lightning bolt seek many routes from heaven to earth, or a crack
begin to wander and divide? Branching forms find a compromise between
disorder and determinism: they hint at a new and peculiar geometry. Yet
sometimes order reasserts itself, as when the arms of snowflakes insist on their
hexagonality. And if branches reunite, the loops form a web that offers many
routes to the same destination. Navigation and dissemination on such networks
then depends on the pattern of connections.
 CONTENTS

Preface and acknowledgements

1. A Winter’s Tale
THE SIX-POINTED SNOWFLAKE
2. Tenuous Monsters
SHAPES BETWEEN DIMENSIONS
3. Just For the Crack
CLEAN BREAKS AND RAGGED RUPTURES
4. Water Ways
LABYRINTHS IN THE LANDSCAPE
5. Tree and Leaf
BRANCHES IN BIOLOGY
6. Web Worlds
WHY WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER
Epilogue: The Threads of the Tapestry
PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

After my 1999 book The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature went
out of print, I’d often be contacted by would-be readers asking where they could
get hold of a copy. That was how I discovered that copies were changing hands
in the used-book market for considerably more than the original cover price.
While that was gratifying in its way, I would far rather see the material
accessible to anyone who wanted it. So I approached Latha Menon at Oxford
University Press to ask about a reprinting. But Latha had something more
substantial in mind, and that is how this new trilogy came into being. Quite
rightly, Latha perceived that the original Tapestry was neither conceived nor
packaged to the best advantage of the material. I hope this format does it more
justice.
The suggestion of partitioning the material between three volumes sounded
challenging at first, but once I saw how it might be done, I realized that this
offered a structure that could bring more thematic organization to the topic. Each
volume is self-contained and does not depend on one having read the others,
although there is inevitably some cross-referencing. Anyone who has seen The
Self-Made Tapestry will find some familiar things here, but also plenty that is
new. In adding that material, I have benefited from the great generosity of many
scientists who have given images, reprints and suggestions. I am particularly
grateful to Sean Carroll, Iain Couzin, and Andrea Rinaldo for critical readings of
some of the new text. Latha set me more work than I’d perhaps anticipated, but I
remain deeply indebted to her for her vision of what these books might become,
and her encouragement in making that happen.

Philip Ball London, October 2007

 1
A WINTER’S TALE

The Six-Pointed Snowflake

The followers of Pythagoras believed many strange things, among them that one
should not eat beans or break bread, should not pluck a garland and should not
allow swallows to land on one’s roof. They sound like a bunch of crackpot
mystics, but in fact Pythagoreanism has, through its influence on Plato, provided
a recurrent theme in Western rationalist thought: the idea that the universe is
fundamentally geometric, so that all natural phenomena display a harmony based
on number and regularity. Pythagoras is said to have discovered the relationship
between proportion and musical harmony, reflected in the way that a plucked
string divided by simple length ratios produces pleasing musical intervals. The
‘music of the spheres’—celestial harmonies generated by the heavenly bodies
according to the sizes of their orbits—is ultimately a Pythagorean concept.
‘All things are numbers’, said Pythagoras, but it is not easy now to
comprehend what he meant by this statement. In some fashion, he believed that
integers were building blocks from which the world was constructed. Bertrand
Russell is probably imposing too modern a perspective when he interprets the
phrase as saying that the world is ‘built up of molecules composed of atoms
arranged in various shapes’, even if, for Plato, those atoms themselves were
geometric: cubes, tetrahedra, and other regular shapes that, he said, account for
the empirical properties of the corresponding classical elements. All the same, it
seems fair to suppose that a Pythagorean would have been less surprised than we
are to find spontaneous regularity of pattern and form in the world—five-
petalled flowers, faceted crystals—because he would have envisaged this
orderliness to be engraved in the very fabric of creation.
The ancient Greeks were not alone in thinking this way. Chinese scholars of
long ago were as devoted to the study of nature and mathematics as any of their
Western counterparts, and by all appearances they were rather more observant. It
was not until the European Middle Ages that the Aristotelian tradition of
studying specific natural phenomena for their own sake began to permeate the
Western world, prompting the thirteenth-century Bavarian proto-scientist
Albertus Magnus to record the ‘star-shaped form’ of snowflakes, which can be
seen with the naked eye. But the Chinese anticipated him by more than a
millennium. Around 135 BCxs, the philosopher Han Ying wrote in his treatise
Moral Discourses Illustrating the Han Text of the ‘Book of Songs’ that ‘Flowers
of plants and trees are generally five-pointed, but those of snow, which are called
ying, are always six-pointed.’ It is a casual reference, as though he is mentioning
something that everyone already knew.
Chinese poets and writers in the subsequent centuries took this fact for
granted. In the sixth century AD, Hsiao T’ung wrote:

The ruddy clouds float in the four quarters of the caerulean sky
And the white snowflakes show forth their six-petalled flowers.

By the seventeenth century, Chinese scholars had become more systematic and
scientific in their approach. ‘Every year at the end of winter and the beginning of
spring I used to collect snow crystals myself and carefully examined them’,
wrote Hsien Tsai-hang in his Five Assorted Offering Trays (c.1600). He may
have used a magnifying glass for this work, which led him to conclude that ‘all
were six-pointed’.
It was no surprise to the Chinese sages that snow crystals were six-pointed,
because many of them held a view of nature that was every bit as numerological
as that of the Pythagoreans. Still today, numerical schemes provide a central
ordering principle in Chinese thought, from the Eightfold Way of Daoism to the
‘Four Greats’ of Mao’s personality cult. In a system of ‘correspondences’
analogous to that of the Western mystical tradition, the elements were deemed to
have numbers associated with them, and as the great philosopher Chu Hsi wrote
in the twelfth century, ‘Six generated from Earth is the perfected number of
Water.’ Thus, according to the scholar T’ang Chin, ‘when water congeals into
flowers they must be six-pointed’, because ‘six is the true number of Water’.
The problem with this scheme is that it stifles further enquiry: given such an
‘explanation’ (which we now see as little more than a tautology), there is nothing
more to be said. A profound mystery is reduced to a commonplace fact. And so,
in the words of sinologist Joseph Needham, ‘the Chinese, having found the
hexagonal symmetry [of snowflakes], were content to accept it as a fact of
nature’.
Here, then, is a rejoinder to the accusation that a scientific attitude is prone to
blunt our wonderment at the world. In the mystic’s teleological universe, order
and pattern are only to be expected: they are part of the Grand Design. There is
nevertheless value in such an outlook, which can help to bring to our notice the
regularities that exist in nature—we may not see them at all if we do not expect
them. In fact, mysticism in all its guises can lead us to perceive too much order,
making us prone to seeing significance where there is only the play of chance.
The human mind seems to be predisposed to this error, for pattern recognition is
an essential survival tool and it seems we must resign ourselves to living with its
tiresome side-effects, from numerology to ‘faces’ on the surface of Mars.
But although the mystical Platonic vision of a geometric, ordered universe
helped prepare the ground for early Western science, it needed to be replaced by
something more empirical, more discerning and sceptical, before we could truly
begin to understand how the world works. The snowflake offers a delightful
illustration of that process. For it is only when we start to regard these ice
crystals as things in themselves, and not as symbols of some deeper principle of
nature, that we can truly appreciate how astonishing they are. Their elegance and
beauty is, I believe, unrivalled in the natural world, and even Bach would have
been silenced by the invention with which they play variations on a simple
theme, this interplay of ‘sixness’ and ‘branchingness’ in which symmetry seems
to be taken about as far as it can tolerate (Fig. 1.1 and Plate 1). They are formed
from chaos, from the random swirling of water vapour that condenses molecule
by molecule, with no template to guide them. Whence this branchingness?
Wherefore this sixness?
Fig. 1.1: The snowflake displays an urge for branching growth played out with
exquisite hexagonal symmetry. (Photo: Ken Libbrecht, California Institute of
Technology.)
 KEPLER’S BALLS

In the mechanistic worldview that emerged in the West during the wane of the
Renaissance, an appeal to numerology could not suffice to account for the
remarkable symmetry of the snowflake. The spirit of the age insisted on
causative forces that dictated how things happened in their own terms. One
could concede that God set the forces at play while insisting that, on a day-to-
day basis, they were all He had to work with.
Snowflakes interested the Englishman Thomas Hariot, who noted in his
private manuscripts in 1591 that they have six points. Hariot was a masterful
mathematician, noted for his contributions to algebra, but his enthusiasms
showed the characteristic magpie diversity of the Elizabethan intellectual, among
them astronomy, astrology, and linguistics. He tutored Walter Raleigh in
mathematics, and when Raleigh set out on a voyage to the New World in 1585
he employed Hariot as navigator. Together they sailed to the land that Raleigh
named in honour of his Virgin Queen: Virginia. On the voyage, Raleigh sought
Hariot’s expert advice about the most efficient way to stack cannonballs on deck.
The question led Hariot to the beginnings of a theory about the close-packing
of spheres. Some time between 1606 and 1608 he communicated his thoughts to
a fellow astronomer, the German Johannes Kepler, who enjoyed the patronage of
the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II at his illustrious court in Prague. Most of
the correspondence between Kepler and Hariot concerns the refraction of light
and the origin of rainbows, but they also discussed atomism: what are atoms, and
can empty space come between them? This was an ancient theme, prompted by
the belief that nature abhors a vacuum, but it seemed then to be as irresolvable as
ever. The issue of how atoms sat against one another brought Hariot back to
Raleigh’s cannonballs, and he asked what Kepler thought about the matter. In
1611 Kepler wrote a short treatise in which he speculated that the familiar
cannonball stacking, which disports the balls in a hexagonal, honeycomb array,
is the densest arrangement there can be. The hexagonal packing ‘will be the
tightest possible’, he wrote, ‘so that in no other arrangement could more pellets
be stuffed into the same container’.* The booklet in which this assertion was
contained was a New Year’s gift from Kepler to his patron Johann Matthaus
Wacker von Wackenfels: seasonably so, for its title indicates the object towards
which Kepler’s thoughts on close-packing became directed. It was called On the
Six-Cornered Snowflake.
‘There must be a cause why snow has the shape of a six-cornered starlet’,
Kepler says. ‘It cannot be chance. Why always six? The cause is not to be
looked for in the material, for vapour is formless and flows, but in an agent.’ But
Kepler does not claim that he can solve the mystery; indeed, his booklet is a
rather charming study in bafflement, full of false trails and head-scratching.
Nonetheless, it contains the seed of an important idea. Prompted by his
discussions with Hariot, Kepler began to think about the geometrical shapes that
bodies will adopt if their constituent particles are close-packed like cannonballs.
He suggested that the hexagonal symmetry he had seen in snowflakes that he
collected and observed that very winter might stem from the stacking of
‘globules’ of water. These globules are not in themselves atoms; rather, he said,
‘vapour coagulates into globules of a definite size, as soon as it begins to feel the
onset of cold’. They are like little droplets, and, as such, are perfectly spherical.
Yet in the end Kepler rejects this idea, for he notes that balls can be packed
into other regular patterns too—notably square arrays—and yet four-pointed
snowflakes are never observed. He remarks that flowers commonly display five-
pointed heads (a notion I explored in Book I), which he attributes to a ‘formative
faculty’ or plant soul. But ‘to imagine an individual soul for each and any starlet
of snow is utterly absurd’, Kepler wrote, ‘and therefore the shapes of snowflakes
are by no means to be deduced from the operation of soul in the same way as
with plants.’ So how does water vapour acquire a formative faculty? It must, in
the end, be God’s work—which sounds like a capitulation, but in fact reflects the
semi-mystical belief common among early seventeenth-century philosophers
that nature is imbued with ‘hidden’ forces that shape its forms. Yet what purpose
could be served by this symmetrical expression of a gaseous formative faculty?
There is none, Kepler decides: ‘No purpose can be observed in the shaping of a
snowflake … [the] formative reason does not act only for a purpose, but also to
adorn … [it] is in the habit also of playing with the passing moment.’ In this
seemingly whimsical conclusion we can discern something valid and profound
—for, as I hope this trilogy will show, nature does indeed seem to have an
intrinsic pattern-forming tendency that it exercises as though from some
irrepressible urge. Kepler even hints inadvertently at the way this impulse can
act in living organisms in apparent defiance of the strict utilitarianism that
Darwinism later seemed to dictate.
Despite its inconclusiveness, Kepler’s treatise on the snowflake established
the idea that the geometric shapes of crystals are related to the ordered
arrangements of their component units. From this elementary notion came the
science of crystallography, beginning in the late eighteenth century, in which the
faceted nature of mineral crystals is explained in terms of close-packing of their
atoms and molecules (Fig. 1.2). And what is more, his invocation of an almost
vitalistic principle behind the growth of snowflakes, redolent of (if not the same
as) the ‘soul’ that guides the growth of plants, captures something of the
confusion that snowflakes provoke. The sixness, the hexagonal symmetry,
speaks of crystals, of a regularity so perfect that it appears barren. But the
branchingness hints at life and growth, at something vegetative and vital.
Fig. 1.2: Early crystallographers such as René Just Häuy, from whose book Traité
de Minéralogie (1801) this illustration comes, explained the faceted shapes of
crystals in terms of the packing of their component atoms.
 René Descartes, the arch-mechanist of the early Enlightenment, could not
resist the allure of snowflakes. He sketched them in 1637 for his study of
meteorology, Les Météores, where he recorded rarer varieties alongside the six-
pointed stars (Fig. 1.3):

After this storm cloud, there came another, which produced only
little roses or wheels with six rounded semicircular teeth …
which were quite transparent and quite flat … and formed as
perfectly and as symmetrically as one could possibly imagine.
There followed, after this, a further quantity of such wheels
joined two by two by an axle, or rather, since at the beginning
these axles were quite thick, one could as well have described
them as little crystal columns, decorated at each end with a six-
petalled rose a little larger than their base. But after that there fell
more delicate ones, and often the roses or stars at their ends were
unequal. But then there fell shorter and progressively shorter ones
until finally these stars completely joined, and fell as double stars
with twelve points or rays, rather long and perfectly symmetrical,
in some all equal, in other alternately unequal.
Fig. 1.3: Drawings of snowflakes by Reneé Descartes in 1637.

We can recognize in this vivid description some of the unusual forms that have
been found in snowflakes, such as prismatic columns with end-caps, like
elaborate sundials, and twelve-pointed stars in which two hexagonal flakes have
become fused (Fig. 1.4).
The English scientist Robert Hooke had the advantage of a microscope in
preparing illustrations of snowflakes for his famous Micrographia (1665), where
he shows that the ‘flowers’ are not just six-pointed but branch repeatedly, in a
hierarchical manner (Fig. 1.5a). The organic associations of these ice crystals are
very apparent in the drawings by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico
Cassini in 1692, where they look almost leafy (Fig. 1.5b). The biologist Thomas
Huxley acknowledged this aspect in 1869, when he called snowflakes ‘frosty
imitations of the most complex forms of vegetable foliage’. Huxley’s comments
appeared in an essay on ‘the physical basis of life’, in which he strove like a
good positivist to quell any notion of a vital force that animated organic matter
and made it fundamentally different from the inorganic world. To Huxley, the
‘organic’ forms of snowflakes provided evidence that the complex shapes of the
biological world need not compel the scientist to invoke some mysterious
vitalistic sculpting mechanism, since something of that nature surely did not
operate in the simple process of the freezing of water:
Fig. 1.4: Twelve-pointed snowflakes are formed when two normal six-pointed
varieties fuse together at their centres, rotated in relation to one another by about
30°. (Photo: Ken Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology.)
 We do not assume that a something called ‘aquosity’ entered into
and took possession of the oxide of hydrogen as soon as it was
formed, and then guided the aqueous particles to their places in
the facets of the crystal, or amongst the leaflets of the hoar-frost.

Fig. 1.5: Using an early microscope, Robert Hooke recorded the characteristic
‘Christmas-tree’ branching patterns of snowflakes (a). Giovanni Domenico
Cassini’s drawings from 1692 seem to make reference to their resemblance to
plants (b).
It was a reasonable enough assertion, but it surely begs the question: if there is
nothing ‘organic’ about the formation of the snowflake, why then do they look
so tantalizingly as though there is?

FLAKES FROZEN ON FILM

As Descartes hinted, the shapes of snowflakes can evolve and mutate as the
weather changes. Friedrich Martens, on board a ship travelling from Spitzbergen
in Norway to Greenland in 1675, noticed that different meteorological conditions
produce different kinds of flake. It takes an Arctic chill to condense the best,
most symmetrical snowflakes, as the English explorer William Scoresby noted in
his Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern
Whale-Fishery in 1820. Scoresby took the observations of snowflakes to a new
standard of detail and accuracy, recording a wide range of different shapes (Fig.
1.6). One of the most charming of nineteenth-century records was that produced
in 1864 by a minister’s wife in Maine named Frances Knowlton Chickering, who
used, if not invented, the trick now popular at Christmas of cutting out doily-
style snowflakes from folded paper. Chickering’s paper flakes were masterpieces
of dexterity: from memory of her first-hand observations, she clipped out
delicate frond-like branches and pasted the results into her Cloud Crystals: A
SnowFlake Album, which implicitly acknowledged the ‘artistry’ of natural
phenomena that the biologist Ernst Haeckel was later to celebrate in his
drawings of marine life, as we saw in Book I.
Fig. 1.6: In 1820, explorer William Scoresby made accurate drawings of the
snowflakes he observed during a trip to the Arctic.
 The accuracy of all these visual records of snowflakes was limited not only
by the power of the magnifying glass or microscope but also by the artist’s
inevitable tendency to simplify, idealize, and interpolate these complex
geometric forms. That problem was avoided once researchers found a way to
marry the new art of photography to the power of the microscope.
Microphotography was already a well-established technique by the late
nineteenth century, and one of its most inventive practitioners was a Vermont
farmer named Wilson Bentley. Between 1885 and 1931, Bentley captured over
5,000 images of snowflakes on photographic plates, constituting one of the most
comprehensive surveys of their astonishing variety and beauty (Fig. 1.7). In the
late 1920s Bentley compiled 2,000 of his photographs into a book entitled Snow
Crystals in collaboration with William J. Humphreys, a physicist working for the
US Weather Bureau. Bentley died only a few weeks after the book was
published in November 1931, allegedly after contracting pneumonia during one
of his forays into the New England winter.
Snow Crystals is rightly regarded as a work of wonder, but it is more than
that. The scientist, gazing at page after page of seemingly infinite variety on the
theme of the six-pointed flower of ice, faces a mystery of an order not previously
encountered in the non-living world. Not only were the forms indescribably
complex, but there was no end to them.
Bentley’s album was pure description, to which Humphreys could add rather
little in the way of hard science. But in the 1930s the book inspired a Japanese
nuclear physicist named Ukichiro Nakaya, working at the University of
Hokkaido, to consider the question of snowflake growth in a rather more
analytical spirit. He made the first systematic attempt to discover the factors that
influenced snowflake growth, leading to the many different families of shapes
that had been seen by Scoresby and others in the natural environment. Nakaya
realized that snowflakes fall into several distinct categories, and he constructed a
laboratory for exploring the conditions that generated these different classes of
shape.
It was uncomfortable work: Nakaya’s wooden-walled lab could be cooled to
−30°C, and he worked in padded clothing with a mask to protect his face.
Snowflakes grow slowly as they fall through the atmosphere, but Nakaya could
not recreate this long descent in the lab, so instead he decided to reverse the
situation: to hold the snowflake fixed and to let cold, moist air pass over it in a
steady stream. The question was, how do you hold onto a snowflake? Nakaya
experimented with many different kinds of filament for immobilizing a growing
crystal of ice, but most of them simply became coated with frost. He finally
found that the experiment worked best with a strand of rabbit hair, on which the
natural oils suppressed the simultaneous nucleation of many ice crystals at once
(Fig. 1.8). Using this equipment, Nakaya and his coworkers found that the
shapes of the individual crystals changed as two key factors were altered: the
temperature and humidity of the air. At low humidity, the crystals did not
develop the six frond-like arms of classic snowflakes, but took on more compact
forms: hexagonal plates and prisms. These shapes persisted even in moister air if
it was very cold (below about −20°C). At higher temperatures, however,
increasing the humidity tended to increase the delicacy and complexity of the
snowflakes, giving rise to the highly branched star forms. In a temperature range
between about −3 and −5°C, needle-like crystals appeared instead (Fig. 1.9).
Fig. 1.8: Snowflakes made artificially by Ukichiro Nakaya in the 1930s. In the
image on the left, the rabbit’s hair on which the crystals are nucleated is still
visible.
 Nakaya collected his findings in an album of images clearly indebted to
Bentley and Humphreys, called Snow Crystals: Natural and Artificial (1954).
His studies brought some order to the ice menagerie, but they did not really
bring us any closer to understanding the fundamental mechanism by which a
simple process of crystallization, which typically generates a compact prismatic
or polyhedral shape, in this case gives us structures that seem to have a life of
their own.
As I explained in the previous volumes, the first person to tackle this sort of
question about the genesis of complex form within a modern scientific
framework was the Scottish zoologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose
1917 book On Growth and Form set the scene for everything I discuss in this
series. Thompson included drawings based on Bentley’s photographs in the 1942
revised edition of his book. ‘The snow crystal’, he wrote, ‘is a regular hexagonal
plate or thin prism.’ But ‘ringing her changes on this fundamental form, Nature
superadds to the primary hexagon endless combinations of similar plates or
prisms, all with identical angles but varying lengths of side; and she repeats,
with an exquisite symmetry, about all three axes of the hexagon, whatsoever she
may have done for the adornment and elaboration of one.’ In other words, all the
arms appear to be identical. ‘The beauty of a snow-crystal depends on its
mathematical regularity and symmetry’, Thompson observed,
Fig. 1.9: The ‘morphology diagram’ of snowflakes, showing how their shape
changes for different conditions of temperature and humidity (supersaturation).
 but somehow the association of many variants of a single type, all
related but no two the same, vastly increases our pleasure and
admiration. Such is the peculiar beauty which a Japanese artist
sees in a bed of rushes or a clump of bamboos, especially when
the wind’s ablowing; and such is the phase-beauty of a flowering
spray when it shews every gradation from opening bud to fading
flower.

Here it is again: flowers and ice. But even Thompson, like Kepler, could say no
more. With all his ideas about forces and equilibria and geometry, he, too, was
forced to take recourse in metaphors from the organicworld.

ENDLESS BRANCHES

By the time Nakaya’s book appeared, scientists had found a way to attack the
problem. Although ice seems to be unique in forming highly symmetrical,
isolated flakes, many other substances may crystallize as needle-like protrusions
punctuated by regular branches, like a single snowflake arm. These structures,
known as dendrites (from the Greek for ‘tree’) are found when molten metals
freeze (Fig. 1.10a), when salts precipitate out of a solution, and when metal
deposits form on electrically charged electrodes, a process known as electro
deposition and related to electroplating (Fig. 1.10b) (see page 31). Dendrites
typically have a rounded tip, like the prow of a boat, behind which side-arms
sprout and grow in a Christmas-tree pattern. In general, they appear when the
solidification process happens rapidly, as for example when a molten metal is
quenched (‘undercooled’) by being plunged into cold surroundings. That’s an
important clue. We observed in Book I that complex pattern and form is often
generated in processes that take place significantly out of thermodynamic
equilibrium—which is to say, when the system is highly unstable. A system in
equilibrium does not change; a system out of equilibrium ‘seeks’ to attain such a
stable state if left alone to do so, but can be driven away from this goal by a
constant influx of energy. We saw in Book II that convection (the flow of a fluid
when heated from below) produces such a non-equilibrium state. A liquid that is
abruptly cooled far below its freezing point is another non-equilibrium system,
being unstable relative to the solid form of the material. That instability makes
change happen rapidly, under which conditions pattern is apt to appear. In
contrast, crystals that are formed close to equilibrium—very close to their
freezing point, say—grow slowly, and tend instead to develop the familiar
compact, faceted shapes.
In 1947 the Russian mathematician G. P. Ivantsov showed theoretically that a
metal solidifying rapidly from its molten form may develop needle-like fingers.
Ivantsov calculated that the needles have a shape mathematicians called
parabolic, with gently curving sides that converge on a blunt tip. This is the same
shape as the trajectory of a stone thrown through the air and falling under
gravity. Ivantsov showed that in fact all possible types of parabolic needles may
be formed, but that the thinner they are, the more rapidly they grow; so thin,
needle-like tips should shoot rapidly through the molten metal, while fatter
bulges make their way forward at a more ponderous pace.
But in the mid-1970s, Martin Glicksman and coworkers at the Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in New York performed careful experiments which showed
that, instead of a family of parabolic tips, only one single tip shape was seen
during rapid solidification of metals. For a fixed degree of undercooling, a
particular tip is privileged over the others. For some reason, one of Ivantsov’s
family of parabolas seems to be special.
Fig. 1.10: Dendrites formed by rapid solidification of a molten metal (a) and in the
electrode position of a metal (b). (Photos: a, Lynn Boatner, Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, Tennessee. b, Eshel Ben-Jacob, Tel Aviv University.)
 The puzzle was even more profound, however, because in 1963 two
Americans, William Mullins and Robert Sekerka at Carnegie Mellon University
in Pittsburgh, argued that none of Ivantsov’s parabolas should be stable. They
calculated that the slightest disturbance to the growth of a parabolic tip will be
self-amplifying, so that small bulges that form by chance on the edge of the
crystal grow rapidly into thin fingers. This so-called Mullins–Sekerka instability
should cause the tip to sprout a jumble of random branches.
The instability is an example of a positive feedback process—again, we have
encountered such things already in Books I and II. It works like this. When a
liquid freezes, it releases heat. This is called latent heat, and it is the key to the
difference between a liquid and its frozen, solid form at the same temperature.
Ice and water can both exist at zero degrees centigrade, but the water can
become ice only after it has becomes less ‘excited’—its molecules cease their
vigorous jiggling motions—by giving up latent heat.
So, in order to freeze, an undercooled liquid has to unload its latent heat. The
rate of freezing depends on how quickly heat can be conducted away from the
advancing edge of the solid. This in turn depends on how steeply the temperature
drops from that in the liquid close to the solidification front to that in the liquid
further away: the steeper the gradient in temperature, the faster heat flows down
it. (It may seem odd that the liquid close to the freezing front is actually warmer
than that further away, but this is simply because the front is where the latent
heat is released. Remember that in these experiments all of the liquid has been
rapidly cooled below its freezing point but has not yet had a chance to freeze.)
If a bulge develops by chance—because of the random motions of the atoms
and molecules, say—on an otherwise flat solidification front, the temperature
gradient becomes steeper around the bulge than elsewhere, because the
temperature drops over a shorter distance (Fig. 1.11). So latent heat is shed
around the bulge more rapidly than it is to either side, and the bulge grows, its
apex fastest. This in turn sharpens the tip and speeds its advance even more.
Fig. 1.11: The Mullins–Sekerka instability makes protrusions at the surface of a
solidifying material unstable. Because the temperature gradient (shown here as
dashed contours of equal temperature) is steeper at the tip of the protrusion, heat
is conducted away faster and so solidification proceeds more rapidly here.

In principle, this instability will amplify any irregularity on the solid front
into a growing finger, no matter how small it is. But there is another factor that
sets a minimum limit to the width of the fingers. The interface between the solid
and the liquid has a surface tension, just like that at the surface of water in a
glass. As I explained in Book I, the existence of surface tension means that an
interface costs energy: the bigger the surface area, the higher the energetic cost.
Surface tension thus encourages surfaces to keep their area as small as possible,
and here it tends to ‘pull’ the solidification front flat. Thanks to this smoothing
effect, surface tension suppresses bulges smaller than a certain limit. This means
that the Mullins–Sekerka instability produces a characteristic branch-tip width,
set by the point at which the narrowing of tips caused by positive feedback is
counterbalanced by their cost in surface energy. In other words, the front
develops fingers with a certain wavelength—a regular pattern with a particular
size scale to it, determined by a balance of opposing factors.
In 1977 James Langer at the University of California at Santa Barbara and
Hans Müller-Krumbhaar in Jülich, Germany, suggested that the Mullins–Sekerka
instability might explain Glicksman’s observation of a single parabolic tip being
selected from all of those allowed by Ivantsov’s theory. The instability will make
fat fingers break up into a mass of smaller ones, they said, while surface tension
sets a limit on how small and narrow they can become. Perhaps, then, there is an
optimal tip width at which these two effects balance, favouring a single
‘marginally stable’ parabolic tip.
But in the early 1980s, Langer and his coworkers showed that surface tension
in fact destroys this neat picture. Its influence makes the tip of the dendrite
become cooler than the regions to either side. So the tip starts to slow down, and
eventually it forks into two new fingers. These also split subsequently, and so on.
This repeated tip-splitting results not in a dendritic growth shape at all, but
instead a dense mass of repeatedly forking branches, a pattern known as the
dense-branching morphology.
This turned out to be a persistent problem with theories of dendrite growth:
they seemed prone to instabilities that led to randomly branched fingering
patterns, not the orderly, Christmas-tree shapes of snowflake arms. What these
theories were neglecting, in the mistaken belief that it was a mere detail, was the
most striking aspect of a snowflake’s shape: its hexagonal symmetry. It had been
suspected ever since Kepler that this was an echo of the underlying symmetry in
the arrangement of constituent particles. But no one had guessed that it was to
this symmetry that the dendrites owed their very existence.

THE JOY OF SIX

Why hexagons? Remarkably, the Chinese sages were right: there is a sense in
which six is the number of water. In 1922 the English physicist William Bragg
used his new technique of X-ray crystallography to deduce how water molecules
are arranged in an ice crystal. X-rays bouncing off crystals produce a pattern of
bright spots that encode the positions of the atoms; Bragg deduced how to
calculate backwards from the X-ray pattern to the atomic structure. In this way,
he found that the water molecules in ice are linked by weak chemical bonds into
hexagonal rings, one molecule at each corner (Fig. 1.12). Thus the crystal
structure is dictated not by the shapes of the water molecules themselves but by
the way in which they are joined together.
Fig. 1.12: Ice has a structure with hexagonal symmetry at the molecular scale. The
water (H2O) molecules are linked together by weak chemical bonds called
hydrogen bonds. In this image the spheres denote the oxygen atoms at the
centres of the molecules, and the rods denote the hydrogen bonds that bind
molecules together.

It might seem unlikely that this is the origin of the six-pointed snowflake,
since water molecules are very much smaller than a snowflake—how could this
sixness become so amplified? But as Kepler and the early crystallographers
realized, geometric packing of a crystal’s constituent units dictates the geometry
of the much larger bodies that result. In essence, water’s crystal structure
imposes an innate hexagonality on the way the ice crystal grows. Or, as D’Arcy
Thompson wrote with his customary elegance, ‘these snow-crystals seem to give
visible proof of the space-lattice on which their structure is framed’.
The presence of the hexagonal ‘space-lattice’ means that not all directions are
the same for the growing crystal. That is why faceted crystals have the
characteristic shapes that they do: the flat facets are simply planes of stacked
atoms or molecules, but the reason why certain planes and not others define the
crystal’s form is that some facets grow faster. This nonequivalence of directions
is called anisotropy; an isotropic substance is one that looks the same, and
behaves in the same way, in all directions.
The anisotropy of crystals means that properties like surface tension differ in
different directions. In 1984 Langer and his coworkers showed that, for Ivantsov
parabolas growing in certain ‘favoured’ directions picked out by the anisotropy
of the material’s crystal structure, surface tension no longer induces a tip-
splitting instability—the parabolic tip remains stable as it grows. Thus dendritic
branches will grow outwards from an initial crystal ‘seed’ only in these preferred
directions: the snowflake grows six arms. This special role of anisotropy in
stabilizing the growth of a particular needle crystal was identified independently
at the same time by David Kessler, Joel Koplik, and Herbert Levine at the
University of California at San Diego.
Anisotropy also explains why a dendrite develops side branches. When, by
chance, the parabolic tip develops small bulges on its flanks, these may be
amplified by the Mullins–Sekerka instability. But again, only bulges that grow in
certain directions will be stable. And there is only one kind of dendrite tip, for a
given set of growth conditions, which grows fast enough to avoid being
overwhelmed by these side branches. So a particular dendrite, with side branches
sprouting in particular directions, is uniquely selected from amongst the possible
growth shapes.

HOW THE RIGHT ARM KNOWS WHAT THE LEFT ARM IS

DOING

The mind-boggling variety of snowflake forms is therefore the outcome of a

tension between chance and necessity. The mechanics of the growth process
ensures that the arms will sprout in directions that point to the corners of a
hexagon. For any given snowflake, these arms will all grow at the same rate
(because, at such a small scale, they all experience the same conditions of
temperature and humidity), and so they will have the same length. The side-
branches of this six-pointed star are to a degree at the mercy of fate: they may be
triggered by the random appearance of tiny irregularities or bulges along the
parent arm. Yet they too will always surge outwards in a ‘hexagonal’ direction.
Changes in the prevailing conditions that an individual snowflake experiences as
it drifts and falls in the air may trigger simultaneous changes in the growth of all
the branches, accounting for how, for example, needle-like arms might develop
hexagonal plate-like formations at their tips (Fig. 1.13).
Fig. 1.13: A change in ambient conditions as a snowflake grows in the atmosphere
can result in a change in morphology of the branches. Here needle-like branches
have developed plate-like tips. (Photo: Ken Libbrecht.)

But that doesn’t quite explain it all. If pure chance dictates the side-branching
of the six arms, why are some snowflakes so amazingly symmetrical even in
their fine decorations (Fig. 1.14)? There appears to be something almost magical
at play here—each arm seems somehow to know what all the others are doing.
Nakaya confessed to being perplexed by this apparent ‘communication’ between
the branches. ‘There is apparently no reason’, he said,
Fig. 1.14: Why some snowflakes have arms that are essentially identical in all their
intricate detail is still somewhat of a mystery. (Photo: Ken Libbrecht, California
Institute of Technology.)
 why a similar twig must grow, in the course of the growth of the
crystal, from one main branch when a corresponding twig
happens to extend from another main branch … In order to
explain this phenomenon we must suppose the existence of some
means which informs other branches of the occurrence of a twig
on a point of one branch.

Yet in fact many flakes do not have this perfect symmetry: the six arms look
roughly identical in their general features, but close inspection reveals
differences of detail (Fig. 1.15a). Snowflake expert Ken Libbrecht of the
California Institute of Technology, who has taken up the mantle of Nakaya and
Bentley and Humpreys in cataloguing the richness and beauty of these crystals
by microphotography (his images adorn these pages) says that he commonly
rejects thousands of flakes for every one he considers beautiful (which is to say,
symmetrical) enough to record. Physicists Johann Nittmann and Gene Stanley
propose that almost perfectly regular snowflakes are in fact the exception rather
than the rule. They say that the apparent perfection is often illusory: we are
fooled into perceiving it simply because each arm has side branches diverging at
the same angle and because the ‘envelope’ of each arm has the same shape.
Nittmann and Stanley showed that a model in which particles drift about at
random but stick when they make contact* will produce convincing snowflake-
like shapes if an underlying sixfold symmetry is imposed by constraining the
particles to move from site to site on a hexagonal grid, as though hopping
between the cells of a honeycomb (Fig. 1.15b). None of the branches in this
flake is identical, even though at a glance they look similar. But the general
Christmas-tree shape is preserved in all of them, and their lengths are more or
less the same, simply because both the main branches and their respective side
branches grow at roughly the same rates. The randomness actually ensures this,
because it gives no one branch any opportunity to grow faster than the others.
Fig. 1.15: The six branches of some snowflakes can be quite different from one
another in their fine details, even though at a glance they look symmetrical (a).
Such flakes can be grown in a computer model of aggregating particles that
assigns at random where a new particle gets attached, subject to the constraint
that the particle positions must lie on a hexagonal grid (b). There is nothing in
the rules of the model to ensure that all branches are the same, and indeed they
are not the same; but our eyes are fooled into seeing more symmetry than there
really is by the uniformity of the branching angles. (Photo and image: a, Ken
Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology; b, Gene Stanley, Boston
University.)

Mathematicians Janko Gravner and David Griffeath found something similar

in a more sophisticated model of snowflake growth. Like Nittmann and Stanley’s
model, this assumes that the crystals grow by accumulating units (much larger
than individual water molecules) at the edges from the surrounding vapour,
which are constrained to pack together in a flat hexagonal array. But the
attachment rules are rather complicated, invoking several parameters whose
values can be altered to explore different accumulation conditions. In effect,
these rules ‘build in’ the physical processes involved in crystal growth in a
somewhat ad hoc, albeit fairly realistic, way rather than simply letting them
emerge (or not) from much simpler rules. Gravner and Griffeath were able to
grow a huge variety of snowflakes in their scheme (Fig. 1.16a). In the basic
model all the arms were forced to be identical, but the researchers could also
subvert this by introducing some randomness in the density of the vapour
surrounding the crystal. In that case, the snowflakes could still have six branches
that looked rather similar at a glance, although differing in detail (Fig. 1.16b).
Gravner and Griffeath think that this might be because there are in fact only a
relatively small number of stable side-branching designs: the choices the flake
has are by no means limitless.
Fig. 1.16: Snowflakes grown in a model developed by Janko Gravner and David
Griffeath are remarkably realistic (a). Here the branches are forced to be
identical, but when that condition is relaxed by an injection of randomness, the
branches still look rather similar (b). (Images: Janko Gravner and David
Griffeath, from Gravner and Griffeath, 2008.)

They have extended their model so that it can make three-dimensional

crystals, in which case they find not only flakes of startling realism (Fig. 1.17)
but also the needle, prism and columnar forms catalogued by Nakaya. While
questions of detail remain, it now seems that we are well on the way to decoding
the mysteries of ‘snow flowers’.
Snowflakes have provided scientists and natural philosophers with one of the
clearest indications that complexity of form is not a special attribute of the living
world. Within the snowflake they found an echo of the shapes of trees and
flowers, ferns, and starfish: patterns that hint at an exquisite conciliation between
geometric purity and organic exuberance. These forms have forced us to re-
examine notions of how beauty arises in nature, and how universal processes
connect the living and non-living world. ‘How full of creative genius is the air in
which these are generated!’ exclaimed Henry David Thoreau in 1856. ‘I should
hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat.’
Fig. 1.17: A selection of snowflakes grown in the three-dimensional version of
Gravner and Griffeath’s model. These display the kinds of decorations, such as
ribs and ridges, seen in real flakes. (Images: Janko Gravner and David Griffeath,
from Gravner and Griffith 2009).
 2
TENUOUS MONSTERS

Shapes between Dimensions

In Mike Leigh’s 1976 film Nuts in May, a pair of gauche campers named Keith
and Candice Marie discover how a kind of modern-day vitalism colours our
preconceptions about complex growth and form. They take a trip to a local
quarry to look for fossils in the ancient limestone of Dorset in southern England.
A quarryman shows the unsuspecting couple a delicate, plant-like pattern traced
out in the stone. ‘Is that a fossil?’, asks Candice Marie, awestruck. ‘Ar, most
people think that’, the Dorset quarryman tells them. ‘It’s just a mineral.’
It’s easy to see why Keith and Candice Marie jumped to the wrong
conclusion. The structures they saw are called mineral dendrites (Fig. 2.1), and
they look for all the world like the forms we associate with plants—which is of
course precisely why they are named after them.* But these filigrees contain no
fossil material; they are made of iron or manganese oxides, chemical deposits
precipitated when a solution rich in these metal salts was squeezed through
cracks in the rocks in the geological past.
Fig. 2.1: A mineral dendrite of manganese oxide found in Bavarian limestone.
(Photo: Tamás Vicsek, Eö tvö s Lorá nd University, Budapest.)
 Mineral dendrites scream ‘life’ at us because their branched patterns are
echoed everywhere in the organic world, from corals to leaf veins to the
bronchial structure of the lung. But such branched formations are not by any
means unique to biology: think of river networks, lightning, cracks in the ceiling.
We will encounter each of these in later chapters. And of course not all
branching forms are alike: a snowflake little resembles a naked oak, and I don’t
think we would mistake this mineral dendrite for a fracture pattern. Botanists
and foresters can identify the species of a tree in winter simply from its
silhouette on a hilltop. How do they do that—what distinguishes the boughs of
an elm from those of a sycamore? I doubt that many botanists could tell you with
any great precision. They might mutter something about angles of divergence in
the branches, but in the end they just seem able to ‘sense’ the characteristics of
the pattern. Might we, though, hope to establish a taxonomy of branching, and
perhaps to find within it a boundary that separates the living from the inorganic?
 ORGANIC ROCKS

Keith and Candice Marie were in venerable company. In the early 1670s, Isaac
Newton wrote a short tract that is little known now but was probably considered
by its author to be the precursor to a (never-written) magnum opus comparable
to his Principia. It was called Of Natures obvious lawes and processes in
vegetation, and it was an attempt to sketch out the framework for a ‘theory of
everything’. The work begins with a description of mineral dendrites, produced
artificially—which is to say, alchemically—in Newton’s laboratory.
Newton doesn’t explain exactly how he made these crystalline growths, but it
seems likely that he followed a prescription similar to that of the seventeenth-
century German chemist Johann Rudolph Glauber. Glauber described how iron
dissolved in ‘spirit of salt’ (hydrochloric acid) will generate branched deposits of
its red oxide when added to a tall flask of ‘oil of sand’ or ‘oil of glass’
(potassium silicate). The dendritic structures that can be made this way from
precipitating metal salts are now known as silica gardens.
Newton never used that term, but he might be expected to have found it most
congenial—for he believed there was something ‘vegetative’ about metals which
led them to grow within the earth as veins that are entirely analogous to trees.
The fact that ‘metal trees’ could be made in the lab apparently confirmed this
view.
There was nothing idiosyncratic about the idea, which was shared by many
scientists in Newton’s day. That metals and salts were formed by vegetative
growth was proposed in the early sixteenth century by the Swiss alchemist
Paracelsus, who stated that, just as trees have their roots in the soil and grow
upwards into the air, so mineral veins have their roots in subterranean water and
grow upwards into the earth. Mineral veins, wrote Paracelsus’s contemporary
Biringuccio, an Italian authority on mining and metallurgy, ‘show themselves
almost like the veins of blood in the bodies of animals, or the branches of trees
spread out in different directions’.
Taking his lead from Paracelsus, the French ceramicist and natural
philosopher Bernard Palissy suggested around 1580 that minerals grow from
salty ‘seeds’ that germinate in water. But the idea arose in the late sixteenth
century that mineral dendrites might indeed be fossil plants, perhaps produced
by inundation in the biblical flood. This position was challenged by the Swiss
geologist Jean-Jacques Scheuchzer, whose 1709 book Herbarium diluvianum
(Herbarium of the Flood) contains remarkably accurate drawings of the
branched forms of mineral dendrites (Fig. 2.2). Scheuchzer was actually an
enthusiastic Diluvianist himself, and he accepted the idea that mineral dendrites
were products of the Deluge—but not, he said, as fossil plants. Instead, he
suggested a mechanism of formation that, as we shall see, was astonishingly
prescient. He explained that if a liquid is squeezed between two flat plates that
are then pulled quickly apart, the liquid film is drawn out into a dense array of
branches, just like those seen in mineral dendrites, as air pushes its way in. Thus,
Scheuchzer explained to the Académie des Sciences in Paris, ‘Each time that one
finds small trees in stones that can be split easily, which seem to be painted
artificially and whose small branches are separated one from the other and never
intersect, then one must attribute this arborescence to the injection of a fluid.’
But how was this connected to the Flood? Scheuchzer proposed that the seas
sloshed violently onto all the lands of the Earth when, in an instant, God stopped
the world turning on its axis. The sudden influx of water into the cracks and
pores of land-borne rock could have imprinted these delicate mineral fronds.
Fig. 2.2: Mineral dendrites drawn by Jean-Jacques Scheuchzer, in his book
Herbarium diluvianum (1709).

Flood or no flood, Scheuchzer’s experiment undermined any need to invoke

vegetation as a formative principle for mineral dendrites. By the mid-eighteenth
century, the Swedish mineralogist Johann Gottschalk Wallerius was able to write
in his influential treatise on minerals that

There are naturalists who maintain that minerals have a life like
that which vegetation enjoys; but since no one has yet been able
to see, even with the best microscopes, that these substances have
a juice contained in their fibres or veins, since no one has
established this view with some evidence, and moreover since it
is impossible in general to sustain any notion of life without a
circulating juice, one cannot see any basis for ascribing life to
 minerals, unless one does not want to call living everything that
has the faculty to grow and to increase itself.

Already, life was deemed dispensable in making ‘organic’ forms.

DEPOSIT AT YOUR NEAREST BRANCH

Today it is a rather simple matter to grow ramified crystals such as mineral

dendrites in the laboratory. One way is to use the process of electro deposition
that we encountered in the previous chapter. A negatively charged electrode is
immersed in a solution of a metal salt, and the pure metal grows at the electrode
surface. Metal ions have a positive electrical charge, since they are metal atoms
that have lost one or more negatively charged electrons, so they are electrically
attracted to the electrode, where they can pick up their missing electrons and
revert back to neutral metal atoms. The atoms stack together in a crystal that
grows outwards from the electrode surface.
In electroplating, this process is conducted at a low electrode voltage, and the
metal film grows slowly, coating the electrode with a smooth, even veneer. But
at higher voltages the deposit grows more quickly—that is to say, out of
equilibrium. In that case the metal deposit becomes irregular and branches
blossom from it (Fig. 2.3a). This no longer looks like a crystalline entity,
although close inspection with a microscope reveals that the branches are after
all composed of tiny crystals fused together in jumbled disarray (Fig. 2.3b).
In 1984 Robert Brady and Robin Ball from the University of Cambridge
showed that a theoretical model developed three years earlier by two American
physicists, Tom Witten at the Collége de France in Paris and Len Sander at the
University of Michigan, could account for the shape of these branched
electrodeposits. Witten and Sander hadn’t been thinking about electro deposition
at all, however. Their model was supposed to describe something quite different:
the way particles of dust form clumps or aggregates as they drift about and stick
together in air. Witten and Sander supposed that each particle wanders at random
(a process called diffusion) until it hits another particle, whereupon they stick
together the moment they touch. This means that particles are added randomly to
a growing cluster from all directions. The rate at which the cluster grows
depends on how quickly the particles diffuse—how long it takes them to reach
the cluster’s periphery. For this reason, Witten and Sander called their model
diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA).
 This sounds rather like the way a snowflake grows in the frigid atmosphere:
water molecules diffuse until they collide with a growing flake, to which they
stick. But there’s a crucial difference. In snowflakes the water molecules in the
ice crystal stack together in an orderly manner, forming hexagonal rings. This
implies that, once they reach a snowflake’s surface, the molecules can move
about until they find the right slot in the crystal structure. But in DLA the
constituent particles of a cluster have no opportunity for such adjustment—they
become immobile on contact, and so the way they pack together in the clump is
irregular. As a result, the surface of the growing cluster soon becomes very
jagged and disorderly. You could say that, because the process is occurring far
from equilibrium, the cluster grows too fast for the particles to find the most
compact way to pack together, and there are lots of ‘packing errors’ that get
frozen in.
Fig. 2.3: A branching metal formation produced by electrochemical deposition
onto a central electrode (a). Seen close up under a microscope (b), the branches
consist of conglomerates of tiny crystallites oriented at random. (Photos: a,
Mitsugu Matsushita, Chuo University; b, Vincent Fleury, Laboratory for
Condensed Matter Physics, Palaiseau.)
 Witten and Sander simulated the DLA process on a computer by introducing
particles one by one into a box from random points around its edges, allowing
them to diffuse until they encounter and stick to any preceding particle. This
generates a cluster that grows in tenuous branches (Fig. 2.4). It looks very
similar to the structures created in electro deposition, something that was first
recognized by Mitsugu Matsushita of Chuo University in Japan and co-workers
in 1984. Brady and Ball proposed that this is because the mechanism of non-
equilibrium electrochemical growth shares the same broad features as the DLA
model: random diffusion of ions and their instant attachment to the electrode
deposit. And that’s essentially true, although the details are more complex.
It is clear to see why the random impacts in the DLA model result in very
rough-edged clusters. But why are they branched? We could perhaps imagine
instead the formation of a dense mass with a highly irregular border, like a
spreading ink blot. Why doesn’t this happen?
The answer is that in DLA, as in snowflake growth, small bumps or
irregularities are amplified by a growth instability that draws them out into long,
narrow fingers. When a bump appears by chance on the cluster surface, it pokes
out beyond the rest of the front, so there is a better chance that a randomly
diffusing particle will hit it (Fig. 2.5). As a result, the bump grows faster than the
rest of the surface. And, crucially, this growth advantage is self-enhancing—the
more the bump develops, the greater the chance of new particles striking and
sticking to it; in other words, there is positive feedback on the growth of a
‘finger’. The probability of acquiring a new particle is highest at the most
exposed part—the very tip of the bump—so that growth is accompanied by a
sharpening and narrowing of the tip, generating a tendril that itself sprouts
random appendages through the same growth instability. Notice that the random,
diffusive motion of the particles is essential to all of this. If they were instead all
propelled towards the cluster along straight trajectories, like rain falling on a
road, the edge of the cluster would just advance uniformly.
Fig. 2.4: A cluster of aggregated particles grown by the diffusion-limited
aggregation model. (Image: Thomas Rage and Paul Meakin, University of Oslo.)

Not only does the ‘surface’ of the cluster become ramified and diffuse, but the
interior never gets ‘filled in’. That is because the sprawling branches make it
very difficult for a particle to reach very far inside. Given its meandering path, a
particle is unlikely to get far down one of the fjords between branches before
hitting something—and once it hits, it sticks. This means that the clusters attain
open, fluffy shapes. Within the roughly circular envelope of the outermost tips
(or spherical in three dimensions), much of the space is empty. Soot particles,
which grow by the aggregation of tiny flecks of carbon released in combustion,
typically have the same kind of shape, making them as light and airy as soufflé.
Fig. 2.5: How the DLA model acquires a growth instability that promotes
branching. Small protrustions on the aggregate surface accumulate new particles
faster than the surrounding flat surface, and so they become increasingly
accentuated (a–c). These protrusions will themselves have random irregularities
that blossom into new fingers, so the cluster becomes highly branched. Here the
dashed lines show the contours of average density of incoming particles, and the
solid lines show the average flow of particles, which becomes focused towards
branch tips. Each individual particle takes a highly tortuous path—a random
walk. One such is depicted in c.

WHAT’S IN A BRANCH?

A cluster grown by the DLA mechanism really does resemble a branched electro
deposit, and this might persuade you that the two processes are related. But mere
visual similarity cannot constitute scientific proof that there is truly any common
mechanism behind their growth. I cannot stress this point too strongly—it is a
fundamental issue in the study of pattern formation. When we see two things that
look alike, our instinct is to attribute to them the same basic cause—to infer that
at root they represent the same phenomenon. I have shown in Books I and II that
sometimes this intuition is sound, but sometimes it isn’t. There is reason to think
that the stripes on a zebra’s pelt and the ripples of wind-blown sand stem from
the same interplay of activation and inhibition in the creation of the pattern
elements. However, stripes in an early-stage fruit fly embryo have a rather
different origin. Our facility at recognizing and comparing patterns may help us
to identify connections between systems that seem at face value to have no
prospect of being related. But this mental faculty is apt to tempt us into making
false correlations and untenable analogies.
 How do we know when to trust these comparisons and when not? There is no
simple answer. I shall show in this book that there are remarkable links between
many of the different types of branching structure seen in the natural world. But
we cannot place much confidence in such claims unless we have, at the very
least, some objective, quantitative way of characterizing the patterns we see.
How do you measure the shape of a tree or a DLA cluster?
It turns out that even forms as apparently irregular as these have at least one
measurable property that is virtually as precise, reproducible, and characteristic
as the number of legs on an insect. It is called the fractal dimension, and is a
measure of how densely packed the branches are. It is not a foolproof means of
telling us whether two such shapes are ‘the same’ in the sense of being formed
according to the same principles; but it is pretty accurate at letting us know when
they are not. If we measure the fractal dimension of a branched electro deposit
and a DLA cluster and find that these have the same value, we cannot be sure
that this is because electro deposition is basically a kind of DLA process. But if
the fractal dimensions are different, we may need to go back to the drawing
board to explain how the electro deposit arises.
There is not really any way of understanding properly what a fractal
dimension is without using some maths. But I promised in Book I that any
mathematical demands I would make will be minimal, and I do not need to
renege on this promise now. Suppose that, instead of forming a branching
pattern, a DLA cluster grew so densely that there were no gaps at all between the
particles. Then it would be a solid mass whose outer surface simply expands as
the cluster gets larger. For clusters growing on a flat surface (that is, in two
dimensions), this mass would be roughly circular. In that case, the number of
particles in the cluster (N) would increase in proportion to the cluster’s area. For
a perfect circle, the area is proportional to the square of the radius: to r2. If, on
the other hand, the branches were straight-line chains of particles, so that they
formed a many-pointed star like an asterisk, then the number of particles would
increase in proportion to the length of each of the arms: in other words,
proportional to the radius r of the circular envelope defined by the arm tips. This
corresponds to an extremely open, ‘empty’ cluster. Now, a real DLA cluster like
that shown above lies somewhere between these two extremes: N increases as
the cluster ‘size’ r increases, but neither in proportion to r nor to r2 (that is, to r
raised to the power 1 or 2). Rather, N grows in proportion to r raised to a power
(exponent) between 1 and 2. This means that the DLA cluster fills up the two-
dimensional plane rather more densely than the asterisk-like cluster but less
densely than a compact, circular cluster. The exponent, which is the fractal
dimension, can be calculated by analysing the density of particles in the cluster,
and for two-dimensional DLA clusters it has the value 1.71.
Put this way, the fractal dimension may sound unremarkable—merely a
number that falls out of the model. But it in fact implies that there is something
odd about a DLA cluster: in a sense, it lies ‘between dimensions’. We are used to
living in a three-dimensional world, in which objects have ‘bulk’—they have a
volume, enclosed by surfaces. There are objects in the world that are to all
intents one-and two-dimensional too. Laid out straight, a piece of string is one-
dimensional: you could say that it has ‘length’ but no ‘width’ or ‘height’. Of
course, it does have width and height, but these are negligible in comparison to
the length. The piece of string is strictly speaking a three-dimensional object in
which two of the dimensions are reduced to almost nothing; if the string were
infinitely thin, it would be truly one-dimensional. Likewise, a sheet of paper
extends in two dimensions but has negligible extent in the third (the thickness)—
it is more or less a two-dimensional object. But a DLA cluster is neither like a
piece of string nor like a sheet of paper: it is neither one-dimensional nor two-
dimensional, but 1.71-dimensional.
What does that mean? We will look into this question later, but for now it will
suffice to say that it challenges the notion that the object has a boundary in any
meaningful sense. A piece of paper has edges, and a piece of string has ends:
these are the places where the objects stop. But for fractal objects, there is no
well-defined place where they ‘stop’. If you’re right at the ‘edge’ of such an
object, you can never be sure whether you are actually standing inside it or
outside, because there is no edge as such. Yes, this is very odd. Just stick with it
for a while.
The fractal dimension df is a meaningful and useful property of the DLA
growth process because it is robust and dependable. It stays the same while the
cluster grows bigger and changes shape; and two different DLA clusters, while
differing in the precise positions and convolutions of their branches, will have
exactly the same value of df. In this sense, while we can talk about the ‘shape’ of
a DLA cluster in vague, metaphorical terms, perhaps the only way we can be
more precise about this shape is to characterize it by the fractal dimension.
This quantity df reflects the rules according to which the cluster was grown. If
we change these rules, for example by allowing new particles to make a few
short hops around the surface before finally sticking irrevocably, we will very
probably obtain a branched cluster with a different value of df. Sometimes
changes like this will produce very marked changes in the appearance of the
clusters—they might develop very stout or very wispy branches, for instance.
But the effect of other changes to the growth rules might be rather subtle, so that
by visual inspection we will be unable to say whether the clusters are ‘the same’
or not. The fractal dimension provides a well defined measure by which we can
distinguish such differences.
Here’s an example. In Fig. 2.6 I show another mineral dendrite, formed from
manganese oxide in a fracture plane of a quartz crystal. Is this the same kind of
cluster as that in Fig. 2.1? By eye, you probably wouldn’t want to place bets. But
by calculating its fractal dimension, we can pronounce confidently that the two
are different—the earlier dendrite has a fractal dimension of 1.78, whereas for
the one shown here it has a value of about 1.51. You can perhaps see that the
smaller the fractal dimension, the wispier the cluster.
Fig. 2.6: A mineral dendrite inside a quartz crystal. (Photo: Tamás Vicsek, Eötvös
Loránd University, Budapest.)
 Branched electrodeposits like that in Fig. 2.3a commonly have a fractal
dimension of about 1.7,* and this can give us confidence that their mechanism of
formation does share something in common with the DLA process. But what
about mineral dendrites? You might have guessed from their shapes alone that
the DLA model offers a good description of their formation too, but we now
discover that two mineral dendrites can have fractal dimensions that differ not
only from that of a DLA cluster but from one another.
The French physicist Bastien Chopard and his colleagues have shown that the
formation of mineral dendrites can in fact be explained by a more sophisticated
version of DLA. In their model, the solution of ions that form the mineral
dendrite diffuses through cracks in the surrounding rock, and the ions undergo a
chemical reaction when they encounter each other. The dendrite is formed of
metal and oxide ions: crudely speaking, we can imagine these two dissolved ions
diffusing until they meet and form an insoluble black deposit. This is emulated
in the model by positing two soluble chemical species A and B that move
through the surrounding medium at random and may react to form a dissolved
compound C. If enough C accumulates in a particular region, the solution
becomes super-saturated and C precipitates in the form of a dark material D,
which then stays put. If, meanwhile, a single C particle encounters a cluster of D,
it too will precipitate, becoming stuck to the cluster. Although couched in
different terms, this is actually a reaction–diffusion model akin to those I
described in Book I, where we saw that they are fertile sources of pattern.
Fig. 2.7: Mineral dendrite patterns generated by a computer model in which
particles diffuse by random walks. When particles encounter one another, they
react to form a dark deposit. The model can generate forms with a range of
fractal dimensions: shown here are examples with a fractal dimension of 1.78
(a), similar to the mineral dendrite in Fig. 2.1, and 1.58 (b), close to that in Fig.
2.6. (The square boxes show the regions selected for calculating the fractal
dimension.) (From Chopard et al., 1991.)

Chopard and colleagues found that their model generates fractal clusters
much like real mineral dendrites (Fig. 2.7). The fractal dimension of the model
clusters varies according to the concentration of species B: the researchers were
able to generate simulated mineral dendrites with fractal dimensions of 1.75 and
1.58 (close to the values for the natural samples I have shown) by changing this
concentration.

FRACTALS EVERYWHERE?

I can think of no better illustration than fractals of the fact that science, like any
other human activity, is prey to fashion. In the 1980s fractals were the thing: they
were celebrated in popular books, in posters and postcards and on T-shirts. The
most famous fractal object was the abstract structure discovered in the 1970s by
mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, working at IBM’s research centre in
Yorktown Heights, New York: a bulbous black kidney shape now called
Mandelbrot set (Fig. 2.8). This beast, decorated with wispy filaments and often
sporting furiously (and spuriously) coloured spirals, erupts across the
mathematical plane in response to a deceptively simple algebraic equation.
Mandelbrot pioneered the recognition of fractals as a new type of geometry that
is abundantly expressed in nature (there were antecedents which had hinted at
this idea). He coined the word ‘fractal’ in 1975, and in his seminal book The
Fractal Geometry of Nature two years later he showed how fractal forms may be
found throughout the natural world, from coastlines to the shapes of plants and
clouds (Plate 2). By the 1980s computer-generated fractal landscapes and
imitations of organic complexity had found their way into films and
commercials. Today these elaborate, convoluted forms no longer possess the
allure of novelty; in scientific research, where once it was a matter of interest
merely to identify a new fractal structure, this now elicits a weary shrug of the
shoulders, for scientists have grown accustomed to the notion that they are
ubiquitous.
What are fractals? Mandelbrot called them ‘monsters’, for they have
properties that are strange, puzzling and, to a mathematician, even a little
frightening. Mandelbrot asserted that fractals lie in the middle ground between
forms that display the familiar, regular geometric order that we associate with
Euclidian mathematics—simple shapes such as triangles, squares, and circles—
and those that seem merely random and chaotic. They are, he said, a kind of
orderly, geometric chaos: an apt collision of contradictory terms.
Fig. 2.8: The Mandelbrot set, a mathematical fractal defined by the boundary
between the ‘basins of attraction’ for solutions to an equation. The solutions lie
on a flat plane, with real numbers running vertically and ‘imaginary’ numbers
horizontally.
 If you look closely at the edges of the Mandelbrot set, you will see that it is
bordered with branching tendrils that may make you think of mineral dendrites
and DLA clusters. The link between these structures can be made more explicit
and formal. What both the Mandelbrot set and DLA clusters, along with all other
breeds of fractal structure, have in common is that they look more or less
unchanged as you peer at them more and more closely, zooming in as though
ramping up the magnifying power of a microscope. Take a patch of a DLA
cluster and magnify it, and you will see a ramified object that looks much the
same as the whole. Do the same again to a patch of the magnified region, and
you find the same thing (Fig. 2.9). What this means is that you cannot tell the
degree of magnification purely from appearance, because there is nothing to
guide you. In contrast, you can quite easily assess the scale of an aerial photo of
a town because there will be features, such as cars, houses, roads, that provide a
known measure of length. (Because, as we shall see, many geological structures
are fractal, geologists often leave a hammer in photographs of rock faces to
provide a reference scale.) This property of keeping the same form under
different levels of magnification, which is to say, under changes of scale, is
called scale invariance, or more loosely, self-similarity. One aspect of the self-
similarity of the Mandelbrot set is that, as you zoom in on any region of the
perimeter, the ominous black bulb keeps reappearing like a malformed Russian
doll.
Fig. 2.9: When a DLA cluster is magnified, it looks more or less the same at each
scale. This property is called self-similarity, or scale invariance. (Image: Thomas
Rage and Paul Meakin, University of Oslo.)

Because of scale invariance, fractal forms have no boundary. There are points
in the plane of the Mandelbrot set that are unambiguously inside or outside the
black region, but if you are right on the ‘edge’ then you cannot be sure which
side you’re on: each time you zoom in further, you see more of the convolutions.
This can be illustrated more clearly with reference to a well-known fractal form
called the Koch snowflake, made by repeatedly kinking a boundary line at ever
smaller scales. Take a straight line and introduce an equilateral kink in the
middle third (Fig. 2.10). Now repeat this process for each of the straight-line
segments that result, and go on doing so again and again, each time at a smaller
scale. You end up with a line that zigs and zags somewhat like the repeatedly and
symmetrically branching arm of a snowflake. At each step, you can say precisely
where the boundary line is. But on the next step, that point in the plane may have
been engulfed by a new kink. If we continue this process an infinite number of
times, the line is infinitely convoluted and it is impossible to say exactly where it
passes. The ‘Koch snowflake’ remains a finite shape, but its edge has become
fuzzy.
Fig. 2.10: A fractal object called the Koch snowflake is produced by introducing
identical kinks into a line at successively smaller scales.
 The Mandelbrot set delights visual artists because it is a literally endless
source of baroque patterns that stimulate the eye. It is a kind of map drawn on a
mathematical plane in which each point represents a number. All the numbers
within the black boundary of the set are associated with one solution of the
equation that defines the Mandelbrot set, while all the numbers outside are
associated with another solution.* The technicoloured swirls commonly depicted
in these maps encode how quickly the numbers they encompass get converted
into one of these solutions. The details don’t matter; what is remarkable is the
way the Mandelbrot set generates patterns and forms that have a hundred echoes:
ferns, vortices, lightning. Fractal geometry is inherently visual. Mandelbrot says
that the nineteenth century French mathematicians Lagrange and Laplace:

once boasted of the absence of any pictures in their works, and

their lead was followed almost universally. Fractal geometry is a
reaction against the tide, and a first reason to appreciate fractal
geometry, because of the ‘characters’ it adds to the ‘alphabet’
Galileo had inherited from Euclid, [is that they] often happen to
be intrinsically attractive. Many have promptly been accepted as
works of a new form of art. Some are ‘representational’, in fact
are surprisingly realistic ‘forgeries’ of mountains, clouds or trees,
while others are totally unreal and abstract. Yet all strike almost
everyone in forceful, almost sensual, fashion.

It must be said that this is a double-edged virtue. Some mathematicians sniffily

dismissed the fad for fractals as a kind of fancy computer-graphic doodling,
nothing to do with their precise and intricate art of numbers. And I think it must
be said that the ‘art’ that emerges from fractals generally does not seem very far
away from the tiresome kitsch of rock album covers and psychedelia.*
 But there are other reasons to be wary of making fractal geometry the key to
natural form. Once you get the hang of what a fractal structure looks like, you
imagine you see them everywhere. Without doubt the branched fractals typified
by DLA clusters do represent one of nature’s universal forms, and are splendid
examples of how complex, ‘life-like’ shapes can be the product of relatively
simple and entirely unbiogenic processes. But we must remember that not all
branched patterns are fractal; and perhaps more importantly (since researchers
had, in the first flush of fractal frenzy, a tendency to forget it), just saying that a
structure is fractal doesn’t bring you any closer to understanding how it forms.
There is not a unique fractal-forming process, nor a uniquely fractal kind of
pattern. The fractal dimension can be a useful measure for classifying self-
similar structures, but does not necessarily represent a magic key to deeper
understanding.
Furthermore, what we mean by ‘fractal’ in the natural world is by no means
clear. We saw above that the defining property of fractals—the feature that gives
them a fractal dimension—is self-similarity, or invariance under different levels
of magnification. For the Mandelbrot set, this invariance continues however
closely we look. The same applies to the theoretical Koch snowflake. But, of
course, for real objects the fine details have to stop somewhere, if only because
eventually we reach the scale of atoms. In fact, for most ‘real’ fractals the self-
similarity stops well before that. For a branched metal electrodeposit we have
seen that the building blocks are tiny crystals made up of millions of atoms: at
the scale of these crystallites the surface of the deposit becomes flat,
corresponding to a crystal facet. And for many of the popular examples of
‘natural fractals’, such as ferns, there are only a few self-similar repetitions of
the branching structure. Below the scale of the smallest leaflets, the leaf structure
is no longer fractal, no longer between one-and two-dimensional, but fills up
space entirely: the fern becomes a fully two-dimensional object. Snowflakes are
similar: typically their six arms have side-branches, and there the branching
stops.
Many researchers suggest that, while natural fractals clearly cannot be truly
fractal at all size scales, to qualify for the designation they need at least to be
self-similar over size scales of several factors of ten—say, for magnifications of
up to a thousand fold. But David Avnir of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in
Israel and his co-workers have shown that most real objects declared ‘fractal’
tend to lose their self-similarity at little more than ten times magnification, or a
hundred times at best. This often means that the object in question simply has a
rough surface. Nature’s geometry is fractal, the researchers say, only because
people have become content to call such irregularity ‘fractal’ and not because it
corresponds in any meaningful way to Mandelbrot’s original definition of
mathematical fractals in all its recursive infinities.
That’s as may be. But for highly branched objects like mineral dendrites and
DLA clusters, it is quite possible to ascribe a meaningful fractal dimension so
long as we view the objects at scales where the high degree of branching is
evident. In this case, the fractal dimension provides a good way of making
comparisons between patterns that ‘look’ alike. And I shall continue to use the
word ‘fractal’ to describe them.

SQUEEZE PATTERNS

The Spanish physicist Juan Manuel Garcia-Ruiz was assailed by fractal branches
even as he sat down for a quiet cup of coffee in the Hotel Los Lebreros in
Seville. Across the broad plate-glass windows of the coffee shop crept three of
Mandelbrot’s monsters, like ghostly plants growing within the glass (Fig. 2.11).
Each window pane was made from three laminated glass sheets, separated from
one another by thin plastic films. The laminates were imperfectly sealed at their
edges, so air could find its way between the sheets. In the Spanish heat, the
plastic had become soft and viscous, and the air had pushed its way through the
film in a bubble whose advancing front broke up into a fine tracery of fingered
branches, just like the tendrils of DLA clusters. Recognizing this characteristic
pattern, Garcia-Ruiz took photos and analysed them. He found that the fractal
dimension of the bubble was about 1.7.
Fig. 2.11: Viscous fingering patterns in the layered window pane of the Hotel Los
Lobreros in Seville. These patterns are formed as air penetrates into the plastic
film between the glass planes. (Photo: Juan Manuel Garcia-Ruiz, University of
Granada.)
 The process in which air forces its way under pressure into a viscous medium
as a branching bubble is called viscous fingering. It has been studied a great
deal, because it is relevant to some very practical problems in engineering. For
instance, oil is often extracted from oil fields by injecting water through a
borehole into the oil-saturated porous rock. The idea is that the water, which
does not mix with oil, should advance in a front that pushes the oil to the wells at
the edge of the field. But if viscous fingering occurs, the water front breaks up
into narrow fingers and the efficiency with which oil is displaced and recovered
is very low.
Does this sound familiar? Viscous fingering is essentially the same as the
process described by Jean-Jacques Scheuchzer in the early eighteenth century as
an analogue of how mineral dendrites form (page 30). In Scheuchzer’s process
the air was not forced into the liquid under pressure but was pulled in by the
vacuum created when two plates separated by a liquid film are pulled apart.
That, however, is basically the same thing.
It is no coincidence that viscous fingering produces forms similar to those
made in DLA, even though at face value the phenomena seem quite different—
for, like DLA, viscous fingering involves an instability that makes bulges at the
interface prone to elongation. We have seen that snowflakes and other dendrites
are also governed by this kind of effect, in the form of the Mullins–Sekerka
instability. For viscous fingering, the origin of the branching instability was
identified in 1958 by P. G. Saffman and Geoffrey Taylor, who studied viscous
fingering using an apparatus devised by a nineteenth-century British naval
engineer named Henry Hele-Shaw. He was aiming to study how water flows
around a ship’s hull, but his equipment, now called a Hele-Shaw cell, has now
become a standard tool for research into branching patterns. It consists of two
horizontal, parallel plates with a narrow gap between them. The top plate is
made of some transparent material and has a hole in the centre, through which a
relatively inviscid fluid (such as air or water) can be injected into a more viscous
one (such as glycerine or an oil) held between the plates (see Appendix 1).
The edge of the air bubble (say) moves forward into the oil because the
pressure in the air just behind the interface is greater than that in the oil just in
front of it. The speed at which the interface advances depends on how steep this
pressure gradient is. This is entirely analogous to the role of the temperature
gradient in the Mullins–Sekerka instability; and by the same token, the gradient
is steeper at a bulge, rising to its highest value at the tip. So again there is a self-
amplifying process in which a small bump formed at random at the interface
advances faster and becomes more drawn-out. This is the so-called Saffman–
Taylor instability.*
The analogy between viscous fingering and DLA carries through to the
mathematical level: the equations describing them are equivalent. Both these and
the Mullins–Sekerka instability correspond to a set of equations derived from the
work of the eighteenth-century French mathematician and scientist Pierre-Simon
Laplace, which earns them all the generic name of Laplacian instabilities.
Perhaps if Laplace had been able to think about maths more pictorially, he would
have discovered the origin of these fractal branching patterns nearly two
centuries earlier.
However, tenuous fractal patterns resembling those of DLA occur in viscous
fingering only under rather unusual conditions. More commonly one finds a
subtly altered kind of branching structure: the basic pattern or ‘backbone’ of the
network has a comparable, disorderly form, but the branches themselves are fat
fingers, not wispy tendrils (you can see this in Fig. 2.11). And under some
conditions the bubbles cease to have the ragged DLA-like form at all, instead
advancing in broad fingers that split at their tips (Fig. 2.12a). This sort of
branching pattern is called the dense-branching morphology, and it is not really
fractal at all: it fills up the available space almost entirely, and so has a fractal
dimension close to 2. Why, if the same basic tip-growth instability operates in
both viscous fingering and DLA, do these different patterns result?
All viscous-fingering patterns differ from DLA in at least one important
respect: they have a characteristic size scale, defined by the average width of the
fingers. This can be seen most clearly for low injection pressures, when the
bubble front advances slowly with an almost regular undulation around the
perimeter (Fig. 2.12b). In other words, the pattern now has a particular
wavelength or scale, and so it is no longer a scale-invariant fractal.
This scale arises for the same reason that the branches in snowflake-like
dendritic growth have a particular width: surface tension makes it costly to form
an interface, limiting the minimum size of the crenellations. The fat fingers
represent a compromise between the Saffman–Taylor instability, which favours
the growth of branches on all length scales, and the smoothing effect of surface
tension, which washes out bulges smaller than a certain limit. In the DLA model,
on the other hand, the cluster has essentially no surface tension, and so the
branches may become as thin as they can be, equal to the width of the
aggregating particles themselves. A wispy DLA-like ‘bubble’ can be produced
experimentally in the Hele-Shaw cell by using fluids whose interface has a very
low surface tension. Alternatively, this can be achieved by making the growth of
the bubble more ‘noisy’—more prone to random fluctuations that encourage the
appearance of new branches at the bubble front. A simple way of doing this is to
score grooves at random into one of the cell plates until it is crisscrossed by a
dense network of disorderly lines (Fig. 2.13a). If, on the other hand, these
grooves are arranged in an orderly grid, that imposes an underlying symmetry on
the bubble. For a hexagonal, honeycomb grid, the resulting bubble has a
snowflake-like shape (Fig. 2.13b).
Fig. 2.12: The dense-branching morphology in the Hele-Shaw cell (a). This is only
marginally fractal, with all fractal dimension close to 2. At low injection
pressures, the advancing bubble has a rather smoothly undulating edge with a
fairly well-defined wavelength (b). This is no longer a fractal shape at all (Photo:
a, Eshel Ben-Jacob, Tel Aviv University.)

Fig. 2.13: In a Hele-Shaw cell in which the bottom plate is ‘randomized’ with a
crisscrossing web of grooves, the bubble has a shape akin to a cluster grown by
diffusion-limited aggregation (a). If the grooves form a regular honeycomb
lattice, on the other hand, the bubble resembles a snowflake (b). (Photos: Eshel
Ben-Jacob, Tel Aviv University.)

This is the attraction of the Hele-Shaw cell: it provides a tool for investigating
how a diverse family of branching patterns—DLA-like, viscous fingering, the
dense-branching morphology and dendritic snowflakes—are related. A bit of
noise tips the pattern one way; a dose of symmetry does something else. The
branches are the result of Laplacian growth instabilities that amplify small
wobbles of the surface; surface tension can moderate that tendency. The results
may be fractal, but are not necessarily so. These ‘trees’ are a subtle blend of
enthusiasm and restraint operating at the border of order and chaos.

LIFE IN THE COLONIES

In defiance of our long-standing intuition, then, there need be nothing ‘organic’

about branching structures. Yet, in a curious inversion, the ideas that have been
developed to explain branches in minerals and bubbles are now being exported
back into biology, to account for the complex shapes of communities of simple
organisms such as bacteria.
Forms with ruffled, frond-like boundaries that radiate from a central focus are
familiar in the microbiological world: we see them, for instance, in the way
lichen spreads across rock (Fig. 2.14a). These fringed blobs are also found in
colonies of malignant cells that grow into tumours (Figure 2.14b). The shape as
a whole is not a fractal, but the boundary is: whereas the smooth perimeter of a
circle is one-dimensional, the tumour growths have roughly 1.5-dimensional
edges. This kind of shape was first described mathematically in 1961 by the
mathematician M. Eden, in one of the first examples of a computer model of
biological growth. Eden was seeking to model how tumours develop, but any
growth process that leads to such wavy-edged, dense shapes is now said to be
Eden-like. In Eden’s model, particles (cells, say) multiplied on a regular grid,
with one cell per grid site. New particles were added at random to sites adjacent
to ones already occupied, so that the cluster was constantly accumulating new
particles around its perimeter. This is rather similar to Witten and Sander’s DLA
model, and in fact they acknowledged this debt to Eden. But in DLA the
particles drift onto the cluster from the outside, rather than being effectively
‘pushed out’ from the surface, which makes the clusters more wispy and less
compact.
Fig. 2.14: The growth of lichen colonies (a) and of some colonies of tumour cells
(b) have a compact, roughly circular shape with a ragged, fractal fringe. This is
called Eden growth. (Photos: a, Ottmar Liebert; b, Antonio Bru, Universidad
Complutense, Madrid.)

In the late 1980s, Mitsugu Matsushita and H. Fujikawa at Chuo University in

Japan saw Eden-like shapes in colonies of Bacillus subtilis cultured in flat,
circular Petri dishes containing a water-saturated gel made of a substance called
agar (Fig. 2.15a). They injected a few bacteria into the centre of the dish, added
some of the nutrients needed for growth, and let nature take its course.
By varying the conditions of growth, they found that they could obtain
colonies with very different shapes. The bacteria cannot penetrate into the gel,
and so the colony has to push back the gel boundary as it grows. This is
comparable to the injection of a fluid into a Hele-Shaw cell, and the ‘injection
pressure’ can be varied by changing the concentration of agar in the growth
medium: the more there is, the harder the gel, which can vary in consistency
from jelly-like to rubbery. And the harder it is, the greater the resistance to
growth of the colony. The shape of the colony also depends on the amount of
nutrient available to the bacteria.
Fig. 2.15: Bacterial colonies in a plate of agar gel can grow into several different
shapes depending on the growth conditions, such as the availability of nutrients
and the hardness of the gel. Here are several examples in Bacillus subtilis: Eden
growth (a), DLA-like growth (b) and the dense-branching morphology (c).
(Photos: Mitsugu Matsushita, Chuo University.)

Below a certain nutrient concentration, the pattern switches from Eden-like to

a now-familiar fractal form (Fig. 2.15b), reminiscent of DLA clusters and
sharing with them the same fractal dimension of about 1.7. If, meanwhile, the
gel is made softer at these low nutrient levels, the pattern changes from DLA-
like to one that more closely resembles the dense-branching morphology (Fig.
2.15c). If there is plenty of nutrient and the gel is soft, the colony expands in a
dense mass with a roughly circular perimeter.
The growth of a bacterial colony is clearly much more complex than the
aggregation of inanimate particles or the expansion of a bubble. The cells eat,
they replicate, and they may move around. Yet the growth patterns that result are
the same. It seems that this process, too, is governed by branching instabilities.
But there are important differences. The Japanese researchers found, for
example, that if the gel gets too hard then the bacteria simply cannot move.
Under a microscope, they could see that bacteria in the dense-branching colonies
were swarming about, while those in the DLA-like and Eden-like colonies just
sat there. If they grew colonies of Bacillus mutants that lacked the whip-like
appendages which enable them to swim around, only the DLA and Eden patterns
were formed no matter how soft the gel was.
 In Book II we saw how models of collective motion can explain the coherent
swarming behaviour of organisms ranging from single cells to fish and birds.
One of the first of these models was devised by the Hungarian physicists Tamas
Vicsek and András Czirók, who showed that complex behaviour can result when
the individual organisms follow a set of rather simple rules dictating how their
actions are influenced by those of their neighbours. In the mid-1990s they
teamed up with Eshel Ben-Jacob and his co-workers at Tel Aviv University to
apply similar ideas to the growth of bacterial colonies.
They assumed that the most significant facts to include in a model like this
are that the bacteria move, feed and reproduce. So they adopted the following
rules:
1. The bacteria move at random.
2. While food is available, the bacteria feed at a steady rate.
3. If they eat enough, they reproduce (one cell splits into two); if the food
runs out, they stop moving.
4. The dispersal of food (nutrient) throughout the system takes place by
diffusion.
A single colony might contain as many as ten billion individual ‘particles’
(cells), which is far too many for a computer to cope with. The researchers
therefore grouped cells together into ‘walkers’, each containing many thousands
of cells, and assumed that these walkers moved around according to the same
rules. Thus the walkers, not individual cells, were the fundamental particles of
the model. They moved about on a regular underlying grid, and the boundary of
the colony could advance onto a new grid point only when that point had been
struck a certain number of times by the moving walkers. By varying this number,
the researchers could simulate the effect of making the gel harder.
With nothing more than these elements, they found that their computer model
of the growing colony produced the DLA-like and dense-branching patterns seen
in the experiments. The lower the concentration of food, the more tenuous the
branches become (Fig. 2.16).
But in the experiments a curious thing happens when the amount of nutrient is
very low: the colony suddenly becomes denser again. This does not happen in
the model—the branches just go on getting thinner as food becomes scarcer. The
researchers figured that it is at this point, when things look really desperate, that
the starved bacteria start to do something only living ‘particles’ can do: talk to
each other. As we saw in Book I, the language of bacteria is a chemical one: they
communicate by emitting chemicals which then guide the cells’ direction of
motion in a process known as chemotaxis. This enables B. subtilis to aggregate
into clumps, where the hitherto identical cells take on distinct roles, rather as
though they have become a multicellular organism. Some become spores, which
remain in suspended animation until conditions are more favourable.
So the researchers added to their model a simple description of chemotaxis.
But they made the chemical signal a repellant rather than an attractant: any
walkers that encounter it have a tendency to wander away from the source. Cells
were assumed to emit the chemo-repellant if they became immobile due to lack
of nutrients. This addition to the model produced the denser branching patterns
at very low nutrient levels (Fig. 2.17), as seen experimentally. There is, however,
no evidence that Bacillus subtilis really employs repulsive chemotaxis, so one
cannot yet be sure that this apparent success of the model is not just a happy
coincidence.

Invasion of the mutants

Ben-Jacob and his co-workers not only studied bacterial growth theoretically;
they also learnt the microbiological techniques needed to grow their own
colonies of Bacillus subtilis. While some of their experiments yielded the same
kind of growth patterns as Matsushita and Fujikawa had seen, they also found
some new ones. Occasionally, a colony that was steadily advancing in one
pattern would suddenly sprout an entirely different kind of sub-colony (Fig.
2.18). If cells from such an outgrowth were extracted and used as the seeds of a
new colony, this would exhibit the new pattern, too. It was a mutant colony.
Fig. 2.16: A computer model of bacterial growth that applies only a few simple
rules to the movement and multiplication of cells generates DLA-like branching
patterns that become increasingly sparse as the gel medium becomes harder
(bottom to top) or as the nutrient concentration decreases (right to left). (Image:
Eshel Ben-Jacob.)
 For unlike aggregating metal atoms or smoke particles, bacteria can mutate:
random errors in duplicating a cell’s DNA when it divides spawn genetic
variations in the progeny. These mutations happen all the time; some are fatal,
others have no observable effect. But just occasionally a mutation will make the
new cell better adapted, more able to replicate efficiently, than the parent cell.
This is exactly how Darwinian natural selection works.
Fig. 2.17: There is a change in growth morphology of Bacillus subtilis from the
DLA-type pattern (Fig. 2.15b) to a denser branching pattern (a) at low nutrient
levels. When chemotaxis is included in the computer model, it reproduces this
switch (b: the image on the right is obtained for a lower nutrient concentration
than that on the left). (Photo and images: Eshel Ben-Jacob.)
 Ben-Jacob and his colleagues suggested that what they were seeing in these
spontaneous changes of growth pattern was natural selection in a Petri dish. The
explosive growth and dominance of the new pattern signalled the superior fitness
of the mutants—although whether the new pattern was a cause of this or an
incidental side-effect was not clear.
Fig. 2.18: A mutant colony with a new growth pattern sprouting from a dense
cluster of Bacillus subtilis. (Photo: Eshel Ben-Jacob.)
 This process supplied a variety of new forms. When a mutant colony
emerged, the researchers would breed its cells to obtain a new strain of Bacillus
with new pattern-forming behaviour. Some of the mutant patterns were familiar:
dense-branching colonies, for example, which Ben-Jacob and colleagues called
the tip-splitting or T morphotype. But other mutant patterns were unlike
anything seen in non-living systems. One consisted of elegant hook-like twists
that all curved in the same direction, creating a colony reminiscent of a Chinese
dragon (Fig. 2.19a and Plate 3a). They dubbed this the chiral or C morphotype
(‘chiral’ derives from the Greek word for hand, as these hooks can twist either in
a left-or right-handed direction). Meanwhile, a mutant they called the vortex or
V morphotype advanced as mobile, roughly circular droplets of cells that left
tendrils in their wake (Figure 2.19b and Plate 3b). Under the microscope, the
researchers could see that the cells in the droplets were all rotating in a spiral
vortex—a flow pattern that, as I describe in Book II, has been seen in groups of
other organisms such as fish. This behaviour is not unprecedented in bacteria: in
1916 the microbiologist W. W. Ford reported such vortices in Bacillus colonies
that were consequently given the species name circulans. Apparently the vortex
mutants of B. subtilis have acquired a similar kind of motion.
The researchers have been able to devise models of cell motion that
reproduce these patterns, but it remains very difficult to prove that such models
really capture the right biological ingredients, rather than just generating a
coincidental similarity of form. The biochemist Jim Cowan has some harsh but
reasonable words to say about people who attempt to develop simple models of
complex systems like this: ‘They say “Look, isn’t this reminiscent of a biological
or physical phenomenon!” They jump in right away as if it’s a decent model for
the phenomenon, and usually of course it’s just got some accidental features that
make it look like something.’ It is as well never to lose sight of this brand of
scepticism, which insists that just because we can make a pattern on a computer
or in a theory, that doesn’t mean nature weaves it using the same rules.
Fig. 2.19: New growth patterns of Bacillus bacteria: the chiral (a) and vortex (b)
modes. (Photos: Eshel Ben-Jacob and Kinneret Ben Knaan, Tel Aviv University.)

URBAN SPRAWL

Bacteria are not, of course, the only organisms that grow in colonies which
depend on food and other resources and which suffer if the population becomes
too dense. For many of us, this sounds a little bit like home.
Indeed, the notion of city as organism is an old one. To Lewis Mumford,
whose 1938 book The Culture of Cities was for a long time the bible of
progressive urban planners, ‘the growth of a great city is amoeboid … the big
city continues to grow by breaking through the edges and accepting its sprawl
and shapelessness as an inevitable byproduct of its physical immensity’. The
American urban theorist Jane Jacobs insisted in her analysis of the decline of US
cities in the 1950s that they should be considered as living organisms with their
own metabolism and modes of growth, a notion that led her to become one of the
first people to recognize how complex systems of many interacting parts can
display orderly, self-organized behaviour.
It takes an eye receptive to the character of organic form to notice this, for it
is all too easy to regard the city as an amorphous chaos (Fig. 2.20a). In this
fragmented, irregular cluster of little units, it is hard to discern any sign of the
regularity that urban planners might try to impose. Instead, this structure is
reminiscent of that one sees when small particles aggregate at random (Fig.
2.20b), rather like the clumping of dust and soot or the flocculation of river silt.
As we have now seen, however, such processes do generate characteristic forms,
with boundaries that are more or less branched and ramified, and which may be
analysed mathematically using the techniques of fractal geometry.
With this in mind, the British geographers Michael Batty and Paul Longley
have asked whether models based on diffusion-limited aggregation—the source
of fractal, branching clusters—can tell us anything about the growth and form of
cities. This was a radical departure from tradition. Since the major preoccupation
of urban planners is with the design of cities, they have generally attempted to
analyse city forms with those efforts in mind. And so their theories have tended
to focus on cities in whose outlines the guiding hand of human design is clearly
discernible. But hardly any cities are like this. In spite of the efforts of planners
to impose a simplistic order, most large cities present an apparently disordered,
irregular scatter of developed space, in which residential neighbourhoods,
business districts, and green spaces are mixed haphazardly. By focusing on
centres where planning has created some regularity (like the US grid-iron street
plan), urban theorists have often ignored the fact that cities tend to grow
organically, not through the dictates of planners.
The planned, geometrically ordered city has long been seen as the ideal. As
geometry became a dominant aspect of ancient Greek thought, its influence
extended beyond architecture into the way in which the buildings themselves
were arranged in settlements. The grid street plan was evident even in the cities
of Babylon and Assyria, but is most apparent in the towns built by imperial
Rome: it was a scheme that allowed these settlements, often beginning as
military encampments, to be erected quickly.
Another favourite scheme of geometrical planners was the radial or circular
city plan, in which main thoroughfares radiate from a central hub like the spokes
of a wheel. This became a popular motif during the rationalistic climate of the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Christopher Wren imagined London rebuilt
after the Great Fire of 1666 as a grid connecting radial centres, one of them
focused on his new cathedral of St Paul’s. But he never saw it realized, because
cities that have grown dishevelled will not tolerate an imposed order: the jumble
of streets in the old city reasserted itself faster than Wren or anyone else could
construct new ones.
The fact is that cities are not static objects but growth forms with a logic that
eludes our rectilinear geometric tradition. They are structures that emerge out of
equilibrium. Planners and urban theorists are still coming to terms with this fact,
and they view it with some ambivalence: is it a good or a bad thing for cities to
evolve this way? Should they be allowed to grow ‘naturally’, or should we try to
impose some structure on it all? Does irregular growth mean that cities will
descend into chaos, spawn slums, and lose control of public services? Or do they
grow as they ‘need’ to, finding their own optimal paths and solutions, so that
attempts to enforce regularity just create inefficiencies and sterile, unneighbourly
living spaces?
Fig. 2.20: The shape of a city like London, shown here as a map of employment
density (a), is highly irregular. Rather similar shapes can be seen in the
aggregation of microscopic plastic spheres suspended in a liquid (b). (Images: a,
Michael Batty, University College, London; b, Arne Skjeltorp, Institute for
Energy Technology, Kjeller.)
There is surely no universal answer, not least because it is likely to depend on
the social and economic context in which urban growth occurs. But before we
can even assess the issues, we need to have a description of how cities grow.
That is what bothered Batty and Longley—they felt that this description was
lacking. As a result, it was impossible to predict what a city might look like five
years hence, hampering the ability of planners to anticipate the likely
requirements for transportation, water, power supplies, communications
networks, and so forth. ‘There is a need’, Batty and Longley wrote in their 1994
book Fractal Cities, ‘for a geometry that grapples directly with the notion that
most cities display organic or natural growth, that form cannot be properly
described, let alone explained, using Euclidean geometry’. The title is a
giveaway: Batty believed that the appropriate new geometry was to be found in
the concept of fractals developed by Benoit Mandelbrot—the ‘geometry of
nature’.
For decades, urban theorists have known that the structure of cities can be
described by mathematical relationships called power laws (see page 38). For
example, the population density often decreases fairly steadily as one moves
outwards from the city centre, typically by some relationship in which this
density is proportional to the inverse of the distance raised to some power. A
similar relationship describes how the number of settlements (cities, towns,
villages, hamlets) in an urbanized area depends on their size (in population or
area, say): there are many more small villages than there are towns, and still
fewer cities, and the power law quantifies that fact. Planners and geographers
could measure these relationships, but they could not workout why they arose
from the underlying economic and demographic processes that determine the
evolution of an urban area. They didn’t know the natural rules of urban growth.
In the early 1990s, Batty and others used the methods of fractal analysis to
deduce the fractal dimensions of cities. As we can see from Fig. 2.20a, the
boundaries of cities tend to be irregular and fragmented, and we might imagine
that they are indeed fractal objects, extending over a two-dimensional space but
not fully filling it. The studies showed that in fact the fractal dimensions of cities
span a wide range, typically between about 1.4 and 1.9. London in 1962 has a
fractal dimension of 1.77, for Berlin in 1945 it is 1.69 and for Pittsburgh in 1990
it is 1.78. In general a city’s fractal dimension increases slowly over time,
reflecting the fact that more and more of the ‘free’ space between centres of
development tends to get filled in, making them increasingly two-dimensional.
Fractality extends to the characteristic networks of urbanization too, such as
transport or power lines. The transport networks of Lyons, Paris and Stuttgart,
for example, are branched fractals with dimensions ranging from only just over 1
(a very sparse network) to almost 1.9. The Paris metro and suburban rail
network, for instance, has a fractal dimension of 1.47 (Fig. 2.21).
Fig. 2.21: The Paris Metro is a branched network with a fractal form. (Image: M.
Daoud, CEN Saclay.)
 These numbers mean little by themselves. The challenge is to understand how
they come about: to look for a model of a growth process that reproduces them.
Batty and Longley realized that the mean fractal dimension of the cities that they
and others had analysed (about 1.7) is rather close to the fractal dimension of
clusters formed by diffusion-limited aggregation (1.71). So, as a start, they
decided to mimic urban growth using the DLA model. Recall that in this model
particles execute random walks until they strike the perimeter of a growing
cluster, whereupon they stick where they hit. Batty and Longley suggested that
something similar happens as cities grow: new development units, such as
business or residential neighbourhoods, are gradually added to the city with a
probability that is greater at the city’s perimeter, since there is more space there
for development. Of course, this highly simplistic model ignores a great deal that
is important for urban development, not least all efforts of planners to impose
some order on it. Yet the researchers found that some of the growth laws
observed in real cities are similar to those that apply to DLA clusters.
Even so, DLA clusters and fractal cities do not look much alike: cities are
typically denser, more compact. This shape can be more closely approximated
by relaxing the ‘stick-where-you-hit’ rule for DLA to allow particles to make a
few hops around the cluster’s periphery before they become immobile. But,
ideally, a model of city growth should not just ape the form: it should make
sense in terms of the physical processes involved. We know, for example, that
urban developments don’t really bounce from site to site before finally coming
to rest. Batty and Longley explored a variation on the DLA model called the
dielectric breakdown model (DBM), which we will encounter in the next chapter
as a description of cracks and sparks. DBM clusters grow not by accumulating
wandering particles at their edges but by pushing their way out from a central
point. That sounds more like city growth: new development spreads outwards to
colonize the surrounding land.
DBM clusters again show growth instabilities that favour extension at the
tips. But their shapes can be ‘tuned’ from highly tenuous and almost linear (that
is, almost one-dimensional) to dense and more circular (almost two-dimensional)
by altering the strength of the instability—which is to say, the likelihood that
new growth happens at the sharpest tips rather than elsewhere on the perimeter.
Using this approach, Batty and Longley attempted to simulate the growth of the
city of Cardiff (Fig. 2.22). They conducted a simulation of DBM growth
constrained by the local geography: by the presence of the coastline to the south-
east and the rivers Taff (to the west of the city centre) and Rhymney (to the east).
The cluster was seeded from a point between these rivers, which acted as
impenetrable barriers except at two points where there are bridges that the
cluster could ‘squeeze’ across. The results of the model, for different strengths of
the branching instability, show that somewhat realistic approximations to the city
shape can be generated when this parameter is suitably tuned (Fig. 2.22b–e).
Fig. 2.22: A fractal model of the growth of the city of Cardiff (a), which is
constrained by the coastline (shown here in white) and two rivers. Computer
simulations for different strengths of the branching instability (measured by a
model parameter η) produce urban clusters that are more or less dense (b–e). The
best match with reality occurs for a value of η of around 0.75 (c). Bridges are
included in the locations of the real ones, to allow the city to spill over the rivers.
In these images, earlier growth is shown as lighter. (Images: Michael Batty,
University College, London.)

One of the problems with this model is that it generates only cities that form a
single large fractal cluster, densest in the centre (around the central business
district) and getting rapidly more tenuous as you move out. But areas of
development at the edges of a big city are not always part of the main ‘cluster’:
there are typically many little satellite towns, which may be swallowed up as the
city boundaries sprawl further. You can see several clusters of this sort beyond
the edges of the main cluster in the structure of London (Fig. 2.20a). Physicists
Hernan Makse, Gene Stanley and Shlomo Havlin from Boston University felt
that a different growth model was needed to capture this sort of structure. They
allowed for the possibility of new clusters being sparked off close to but outside
of the main body. These nascent centres of development do not tend to appear
entirely at random, but are affected by what is happening nearby: development
attracts further development. If two small population clusters grow close by one
another, for instance, there is a greater than average chance that development
will spring up between them: shops to serve the new inhabitants, or local
businesses keen to gain a foothold in an up-and-coming area. In short, the
growth of new clusters is interdependent, or what physicists call correlated.
Makse and colleagues borrowed from physics a model that embodies such
correlations, which was originally developed to describe fluid permeation in
rocks. Within this model, new particles (representing units of population) are
added to a growing cluster at random, as in DLA; but in addition, growth in one
region enhances the prospects of growth nearby, with a probability that falls off
quite sharply with distance.
This model generates a jumbled scattering of clusters of all different sizes.
But real cities are firmly rooted to a core, usually the central business district. So
the researchers imposed the condition that the probability of adding a new unit
gets smaller the further it is from a central point. In effect this means that the
model superimposes two growth processes: one that generates a single compact,
roughly circular city cluster, and one in which local correlations between units
can create new sub-clusters around the edges. The pattern that emerges depends
on the relative strengths of these two processes, and can vary from a roughly
symmetrical, circular distribution of units to a clumpy form decorated with sub-
clusters and tendrils (Fig. 2.23). It is clear straight away that these latter shapes,
in which the correlations are strong, look more realistic than those produced by
DLA or DBM, at least for a city like London. The model can also do a pretty
good job of imitating how city shapes evolve over time (Fig. 2.24).
Fig. 2.23: Computer simulations of urban growth using the correlated percolation
model. For increasing degrees of correlation between the growth units (top to
bottom), the shape changes from more or less circularly symmetrical (a) to
increasingly fragmented and clumpy (b, c). (Images: Hernán Makse,
Schlumberger-Doll Research, Ridgefield, Connecticut.)
Fig. 2.24: The growth of Berlin from 1875 to 1945 (a, top to bottom) is mimicked
fairly well by the growth of a city in the correlated percolation model (b).
(Images: Hernán Makse, Schlumberger-Doll Research, Ridgefield, Connecticut.)

It seems, then, that randomness (uncoordinated local decisions about

development, akin to the disorderly aggregation of particles in DLA) can
generate something like the clumpy, messy sprawl of cities. But randomness
alone is not enough to explain everything about the forms of cities. In Batty’s
words, it is modified by a ‘deeper order’, derived from growth instabilities and
correlations and manifested in the power laws that define the structures. This
order seems to be of precisely the same sort that we find in many natural growth
patterns.
Batty suggests that rather simple concepts from DLA and DBM do a fair job
of accounting for the shapes of cities that sprung up during the early industrial
era, which tended to be single clusters organized around the central business
district. But the ‘correlated percolation’ model of Makse and his co-workers is
better suited to capturing the growth and form of post-industrial cities in which
new communications technologies have made work in the centre of the city less
prevalent and the urban landscape less centralized.
The message for planners is salutary, for it appears to question whether
centralized planning for an ‘organism’ as complex as a city can ever succeed. In
the 1960s, planners sought to influence the way in which London encroached
into the surrounding countryside with a Green Belt policy that would restrict
urbanization. Yet there is no sign that these policies have had any effect on the
city’s growth, which has gone right on expanding to the tune of the same
mathematical laws. It will take more than this, it seems, to undermine the
inexorable physics of cities.
 3
JUST FOR THE CRACK

Clean Breaks and Ragged Ruptures

Fingal’S Cave on the island of Staffa, off Scotland’s west coast, is the kind of
place that left early nineteenth-century Romantics pondering the Sublime. You
can sense as much in the characteristically storm-ridden depiction by J. M. W.
Turner, and also in the luxurious harmonies of Felix Mendelssohn’s tone-poem
The Hebrides, composed after a trip to Staffa in the 1820s. This geological
oddity also made an awe-inspiring impression on Joseph Banks, president of the
Royal Society, when he sailed there in 1772 during an expedition to Iceland.
‘Compared to this’, he said,

what are the cathedrals or palaces built by men! Mere models or

playthings, as diminutive as his works will always be when
compared with those of nature. What now is the boast of the
architect! Regularity, the only part in which he fancied himself to
exceed his mistress, Nature, is here found in her possession, and
here it has been for ages undescribed.

For Banks saw that the entrance to the cave was flanked by great pillars of rock
with almost perfect hexagonal crosssections, designs of such regularity that they
could almost have been fashioned by Platonic masons (Fig. 3.1 and Plate 4).
There is a rather more accessible example of this striking geological pattern at
the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim, on the coast of Northern Ireland (Fig.
3.2 and Plate 5). In legend, these two formations are part of the same structure: a
causeway from Ireland to Scotland built by the legendary third-century Irishman
Fionn MacCumhaill (Finn MacCool, or Fingal), a veritable giant and leader of
the band of warriors called the Fianna who guarded the Kings of Ireland. Finn
made the rocky road across the Irish Sea so that he might do battle with a rival
giant of Scotland named Benandonner. When he got there, however, Finn
discovered that Benandonner was a much bigger giant than he, and so he crept
sheepishly back home. But Benandonner crossed over the causeway to find him,
whereupon Finn posed as a baby, attended by his wife. If this is the size of Finn
MacCool’s baby, thought Benandooner, how big must Finn himself be? And he
ran in panic back to Scotland, demolishing the entire causeway except its
beginning and end.*
Fig. 3.1: The natural pillars of Fingal’s Cave on the Scottish island of Staffa.
(Photo: Lucas Goehring, University of Toronto.)

This is the way with natural patterns: we must find an explanation for them
even if it need be magical and valorized by legend. We tell ourselves that these
things were constructed with purpose by intelligent agents, for how could wild
nature be capable of such craft?
Of course, nothing of that sort appears in D’Arcy Thompson’s description of
the hexagonal columns of Staffa and the Giant’s Causeway. He explained that
these rock formations appear in basaltic lava as it cools, contracts and cracks:
‘rupture … shatters the whole mass into prismatic fragments’, he said. ‘However
quickly and explosively the cracks succeed one another, each relieves an existing
tension, and the next crack will give relief in a different direction to the first.’
This is all very fine, but Thompson does not really account for why the cracks
create such a remarkable pattern: a series of vertical columns, each with a
polygonal crosssection that seems most often to be hexagonal.
Fig. 3.2: The Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim, Northern Ireland (a, b). The
polygonal crosssectional pattern of the columns contains mostly six-sided
shapes, although not in a perfect honeycomb (c). (Photos: Stephen Morris,
University of Toronto.)

What these formations tell us with irrefutable force is that cracks are pattern-
formers. Seldom, however, does fracture produce anything quite so regular and
ordered. When we think of cracks, what comes to mind are random branching
fractures that may intersect in reticulated networks (Fig. 3.3). These are familiar
traceries, often to our dismay—they are the marks of old age and decay, the
webs of failure and regret and disaster, all of which makes it of paramount
importance to know how they arise and what guides their wandering paths. In
this much, D’Arcy Thompson was able to make little progress. In view of what
we have seen so far concerning branching patterns, can we now do better?
 WHY THINGS BREAK

It is only recently that scientists have begun to understand why cracks form. For
a long time, the science of fracture and failure of materials limped along with a
ragbag of concepts that could do little to predict what was seen in the real world.
This was much more than an academic embarrassment, for while scientists
remained largely ignorant of what makes a material tough they had no
systematic method for devising the strong and tough materials that technology
demands. They would earnestly apply what seemed to be sensible criteria, only
to end up with substances ‘about as strong as stale hard cheese’, in the words of
British materials scientist James Gordon. On the other hand, their experience
with new materials that were genuinely strong sometimes flew so much in the
face of what seemed like common sense that they had some persuading to do.
Gordon recalls the response of an Air Marshall during the Second World War to
the idea that Lancaster bombers were to have glass-fibre domes: ‘Glass!—Glass!
I won’t have you putting glass on any of my bloody aeroplanes, blast you!’
We can understand the Air Marshall’s feeling about glass aeroplanes, because
we know how readily glass shatters. But one can offer apparently sound
scientific arguments for why few materials should be better for making aircraft
than glass. It consists of disordered silicon dioxide, the same stuff as sand and
quartz but melted to break up the regular crystal structure and then cooled
quickly so that the atoms become all but immobile before they can pack together
in an orderly manner. The chemical bonds between silicon and oxygen atoms are
extremely strong, not far off the strength of those between carbon atoms in
diamond. You need to expend a lot of energy to pull them apart. So why isn’t
glass nearly as strong a diamond?
Fig. 3.3: Cracks form a variety of branching patterns.
 Well, the Air Marshall was wrong about glass fibres—they are very strong.
But our naive chemical reasoning is wrong about glass too: it breaks rather
easily. What is going on?
A stiff, brittle material like glass is tough so long as cracks cannot get started.
But they can be launched from the tiniest of origins: a mere scratch may act as
the seed for a flaw that shoots through the whole material. Window glass
inevitably contains innumerable little scratches on its surface, any one of which
can give birth to a crack that spreads with catastrophic speed and vigour. Gordon
helped to show in the 1950s that only very minor rubbing of glass against
another hard material is sufficient to cover the surface with microscopic cracks.
The reason glass fibres are so strong is simply that they have a much smaller
surface area than a plate of window glass, and so have far fewer of these minute
flaws. The thinner they get, the fewer flaws there are. So cracks have nowhere to
start from. In analogous fashion, Galileo (who was very interested in discovering
why things break) found that the shipbuilders of Venice paid more attention to
the construction of big ships than small ones—because, they told him, big ships
break more easily. There are simply more places on a big ship where a crack
might start.
But why, once a crack is initiated by a tiny imperfection, does it then grow
with such awesome speed, if the bonds between atoms are really so strong?
Knowing the energy contained in a single chemical bond in glass, it is a simple
matter to calculate what the theoretical strength of glass ought to be, assuming
that fracturing the glass means breaking all the bonds along the crack’s path. The
puzzle was that the observed strength is typically about a hundred times smaller
than this calculation suggests it should be. In the 1920s the British aeronautical
engineer Alan Arnold Griffith, working at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in
Farnborough, had a critical insight into the problem. He was at the time laying
the foundations of glass-fibre technology by drawing heated glass rods into thin
threads—work that Gordon later developed at the same institution. Griffith
found that the strength of very thin glass fibres is extremely high, approaching
the value implied by the calculation of chemical-bond strengths. So the question
was not so much why glass fibres are strong but why normal glass in bottles and
windows is so weak. How can a minor scratch confined to the surface be
responsible for disastrous failure?
During the previous decade, the engineer Charles Inglis had investigated why
Britain’s iron ships were alarmingly prone to cracking apart. He showed that if a
plate of material is stressed by bending or stretching, the stresses around a hole
can be much greater than those through the rest of the material: there is ‘stress
concentration’ at the flaw. Griffith realized that the same would apply to
microscopic scratches on the surface of a brittle material. He calculated that a
crack just one-thousandth of a millimetre long and so narrow that it cleaves a
single chemical bond at a time as it advances has a stress at the tip about 200
times that elsewhere in the material. In other words, a stress 200 times smaller
than that required to break the chemical bonds in the flawless material will
suffice to set bonds snapping at the crack tip. What’s more, if the crack lengthens
without changing its width, the stress concentration at the tip gets even greater:
the growth is self-amplifying. What Griffith had demonstrated is that fracture is
nonlinear: the effect does not follow in proportion to the cause. A tiny crack
turns a modest stress into a catastrophic one.

JAGGED EDGE

We have seen already that self-amplifying instabilities tend to have other

consequences too: not only does growth foster more growth, but the resulting
form becomes prey to random perturbations. Small, chance irregularities
generate new appurtenances: wriggles, wobbles, branches. That is just what we
find in cracks. Griffith’s work suggested that a long, narrow crack initiated at a
notch in a brittle material will cut like a knife straight through the material when
it is stressed. This, however, is the exception rather than the rule. A glazier can
make a clean, straight break through a sheet of glass by first scoring a shallow
scratch along the path of the intended fracture, but without this guidance the
crack is more likely to be erratic: ragged or crazy-paved.
A typical brittle crack grows in three stages. During its ‘birth’ from an
initiating notch, it accelerates in less than a millionth of a second to reach a
speed almost equal to the speed of sound. During ‘childhood’ the crack continues
to accelerate, but more slowly. All this time the crack is straight and the
fractured surfaces in its wake are smooth and mirror-like, but once the crack
speed rises above a certain threshold, a mid-life crisis sets in: the velocity starts
to fluctuate wildly and unpredictably, and the crack tip veers from side to side.
Then the fracture surfaces become rough, sprouting a forest of small side
branches.
In 1951 the Cambridge metallurgist Elizabeth Yoffe uncovered a clue about
why cracks may wander erratically. She found that when a crack tip moves at
virtually the speed of sound, the stress field ahead of the tip starts to flatten out
and develop bulges pointing in different directions from the tip’s motion. These
new stress concentrations could make the tip deviate from its straight path. John
Willis at Cambridge showed in the 1960s that in fact the largest stresses at the tip
of a fast-moving crack point at right angles to its direction of motion, suggesting
that the tip should be constantly turning corners.
Yoffe’s analysis implies that windows would not shatter into jagged shards,
but would simply split cleanly, if the cracks did not travel so fast. But that’s not
necessarily so, for even cracks that grow very slowly may take complicated
paths. In 1993 the Japanese researchers Akifumi Yuse and Masaki Sano at
Tohoku University developed a method for growing cracks that move at just a
few centimetres per second, which is much slower than those passing through a
brittle material as it shatters. They sent these slow cracks through flat strips of
glass by using heat to induce stress and lowering the strips slowly through a
heater into a bath of cold water. As anyone knows who has mistakenly put a hot
glass dish from the oven into cold washing-up water, this abrupt cooling can
shatter glass. When hot, the material expands; when cooled, it shrinks. At the
boundary of expanded and shrunken material there are large stresses which can
cause cracking. But the cracks advance only where there is a sharp change in
temperature over a small distance. By varying the rate at which they lowered the
glass strips, the Japanese researchers were able to control precisely the speed of
a crack initiated from a notch at the bottom.
They found that for very slow speeds (about a millimetre per second) the
cracks were generally perfectly straight (Fig. 3.4a). But if either the speed or the
temperature drop between heater and water bath exceeded particular thresholds,
the crack became unstable and began to wiggle—not at random, but in a steady
oscillation with a well-defined wavelength (Fig. 3.4b). In other words, you can
give a glass sheet a rather beautiful, undulating edge just by cracking it with heat
and cold.
Yuse and Sano found that the wider the glass strip, the longer the crack’s
wavelength. If the strip was infinitely wide, the wavelength would be infinite
too, meaning that the crack would head off at a fixed angle to the vertical and
never look back. The researchers couldn’t lay their hands on an infinitely wide
glass strip, but they could find one without edges: a glass tube. And here indeed
the crack simply travelled around the tube’s axis at a fixed angle, cutting out a
perfect helix (Fig. 3.4f ). Such helical cracks are rumoured (this is not easy to
check) to be found in frozen natural gas pipelines in Alaska, sometimes winding
their way around the pipes for miles.
Fig. 3.4: Growth instabilities in slowly propagating cracks through a glass plate.
The crack is initiated at a notch, and advances owing to the stresses produced as
the hot plate is lowered into a water bath. If the speed is slow enough, the crack
is perfectly straight (a). At higher speeds it becomes oscillatory, with a constant
wavelength (b). As the crack speed continues to increase, first the oscillations
increase in amplitude until the sine-wave shape becomes distorted (c,d ). Then
the single crack splits into several branches (e). If a glass cylinder is used in
place of the flat plate, ‘oscillatory’ cracks are not wavy but instead thread around
the cylinder in a helix (f ). (Photos: Akifumi Yuse and Masaki Sano, Tohoku
University.)

As these wavy cracks get faster, the oscillations become more pronounced,
until finally they start to become distorted and kinked (Fig. 3.4c, d). And if the
temperature drop is large enough, the wavy cracks grow branches, apparently
two at a time: the crack repeatedly bifurcates. At this stage, the pattern starts to
become more disorderly—more like the classic picture of a crack—although the
regular waves can still be seen.
Thin sheets of material often break in wavy patterns, although they are not
usually as regular as this. One of the most familiar is the jagged tear made by
opening a letter with your finger (Fig. 3.5). Animangsu Ghatak and
Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of the University of Cambridge have constructed
a physicists’ version of letter-opening, which reveals where this waviness comes
from. They used rigid rods, ranging in width from a few millimetres to several
centimetres, to rip open stiff plastic film similar to that used as transparent
wrappers in packaging. The researchers pulled the rods through the sheet at a
constant speed of up to 2.5 cm per second. For narrow rods, the tears were
straight and smooth, rather like those made by a paperknife. But fatter rods
produced evenly spaced serrations with sawtooth teeth, which have a
mathematical shape known as a cycloid (Fig. 3.6a).
Fig. 3.5: Opening a sealed envelope with your finger tends to generate an
oscillatory tear with ragged, sawtooth edges.
Fig. 3.6: A carefully controlled ‘letter-opening’ experiment using a cylindrical rod
to tear a flat sheet produces a remarkably regular sawtooth tear with ‘teeth’ that
have a shape described mathematically as a cycloid (a). This can be explained by
considering how the tear bends and curls away from the advancing rod edge,
until there is not enough energy to sustain this bending (at the tips of the
cycloids) and the sheet begins to rupture instead by stretching (b). (Photo: a, L.
Mahadevan, University of Cambridge; from Ghatak and Mahadevan, 2005.)

Ghatak and Mahadevan deduced that this shape stems from a mixture of
stretching and bending as the sheet is ripped. The convex slope of a sawtooth
forms as the sheet bends back against the rod in a kind of curling tongue (Fig.
3.6b). This ‘bending rip’ requires little energy, and it sends the crack heading off
at an increasingly oblique angle to the direction the rod is travelling in. But the
further it goes, the smaller the region over which bending occurs, and eventually
there is just not enough ‘bend’ left. At that point the rod, still advancing and
pushing against the torn edge of the sheet, begins to stretch it, and the sheet
ruptures by being pulled apart rather than bent—which means that the rip moves
forwards in the same direction as the rod. Very quickly this ‘stretching rip’ runs
ahead of the rod and so loses impetus. Then the rod catches up and begins a new
bending rip, which heads away in the opposite direction from before. So each
crest of the cycloid, where the rip changes direction, corresponds to the switch
from bending to stretching of the sheet. The crack swings constantly from side to
side, at the same time surging ahead and then slowing down like the juddering
stick-and-slip of a heavy object being pushed across a floor.
Similar ruptures occur on a much larger scale when polar sea-ice sheets are
pushed past grounded icebergs by ocean currents or winds. But apparent
fractures in ice sheets can take an alternative path: occasionally they are found to
run back and forth in rectangular crenellations that interleave like a zipper, a
phenomenon called finger rafting (Fig. 3.7a). These patterns have a rather
different origin. They form when two thin ice sheets, no more than about 10 cm
thick, are pushed against one another. If the ice sheets have ragged edges, then
some of these protuberances on one sheet will ride up over the other, pressing
down on it at the point of overlap. The effect of such an over-riding lip is to
create small corrugations on either side in both sheets, running perpendicular to
the boundary between them. The troughs of these ripples in one sheet coincide
with the crests in the other, so that a single lip induces other overlaps regularly
spaced to either side. These split into the ‘fingers’ of the zipper (Fig. 3.7b). John
Wettlaufer of Yale University and Dominic Vella of Cambridge University
explained all this in 2007 and showed that the same effect can be seen in thin
layers of wax pushed together on the surface of water. It is possible that similar
crenellated structures form on immense scales along geological faults when two
tectonic plates converge.
Fig. 3.7: Cracks in floating ice sheets can develop a zipper-like shape, a
phenomenon called finger rafting (a). This is caused by the collision of two ice
sheets, in which a protrusion on one edge that rides up over the other creates a
wavy deformation to either side, generating ‘zipper teeth’ at regular intervals (b).
(Photo: a, John Wettlaufer, Yale University, New Haven; from Wettlaufer and
Vella, 2007.)
 A MATTER OF CHANCE

These are strange cracks, and very different from the jumble of spidery lines we
tend to associate with fracture (Fig. 3.3). The striking thing about those patterns
is that they cover a huge range of size scales: some are visible only under the
microscope, some only from satellite imagery of geologically vast terrains (Fig.
3.8). And many crack patterns look much the same over a wide range of scales:
as we zoom in at increasingly higher magnification, they don’t appear to change
very much. We merely see ever finer details that we could not make out before.
What this implies is that fracture patterns are scale-invariant fractals.
Fig. 3.8: Fractal cracks occur on many scales. Here is the network of fault lines
that surrounds the San Andreas fault—the image encompasses many kilometres,
although you could probably just as easily imagine it to be a diagram of cracks
in, say, an old layer of paint on a window frame.
 These patterns, unlike the regular wavy cracks described above, involve a
strong dose of randomness. Some of this may stem from the nature of the
cracked materials themselves: rocks are typically haphazard compactions of
grains of many different sizes and shapes, welded together at their boundaries;
cement and porous rocks like sandstone are shot through with random networks
of pores; hard, brittle plastics contain a chaotic tangle of polymer chains. But
some randomness seems intrinsic to the way a crack moves: as we saw, the path
of a crack tip is potentially unstable, weaving this way and that or growing
branches at the slightest opportunity. In this way, even materials with perfectly
ordered atomic-scale structures (crystals) can fragment in erratic, jagged shapes.
A popular model of fracture devised in the 1980s suggests how fractal
branching cracks might thread their ways through an orderly lattice of particles.
The model was intended by its creators, Lutz Niemeyer, Hans Jurg Wiesmann,
and Luciano Pietronero at the Brown Boveri Research Centre in Baden,
Switzerland, to describe a rather specific kind of ‘failure’: not fracture in the
normal sense, but the passage of a spark through a material. In electrical devices
such as capacitors, an electrical voltage is applied between metal plates or
electrodes separated by a layer of insulating material called a dielectric. If the
voltage is too big, a spark discharge crackles between the electrodes. This is
called dielectric breakdown (Fig. 3.9a), and it usually burns out the device. In
some cases it is accompanied by real fracture: the material is shattered by the
flow of charge. In transparent materials the fracture pattern can leave visible
tracks: a frozen snapshot of the spark’s passage, which is in itself a thing of
considerable beauty (Fig. 3.9b). The structure has a branched, lightning-like
appearance, and indeed atmospheric lightning (Fig. 3.9c) is itself a closely
related phenomenon: air acts as an electrical insulator between a charged cloud
and the ground.
Electrical discharge patterns like these were studied in the eighteenth century
by the German scientist and writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and they are
commonly called Lichtenberg figures. Lichtenberg, working at Göttingen
University, was investigating the new science of electricity by building up
intense charges of static and letting it discharge through a block of resin. He
found that dust was attracted to the flow of charge, accumulating on the resin in
a way that revealed the many-fingered routes it took. Lichtenberg’s experiments
led him to invent an early form of electrostatic printing, based on the way
powder arranges itself on a plate of material with an uneven distribution of
electrical charge. He was also the first person to show conclusively that lightning
is an electrical phenomenon by carrying out a hazardous version of the kite-
flying experiment popularly (and probably apocryphally) attributed to Benjamin
Franklin. He constructed a lightning conductor at Göttingen, and corresponded
with Alessandro Volta, the inventor of the battery. (Lichtenberg noted that Volta
had ‘an expert knowledge of the electricity in girls.’*) But it is for his work as an
essayist and aphorist that Lichtenberg is best remembered—as with many
Enlightenment intellectuals, scientific research could not contain his diverse
energies. When Lichtenberg said of his ‘frozen lightning’ that it ‘transfer[s]
terror into enchantment’, it is a reminder of how undervalued today is the
scientist who, with a mot juste, can distil wonder from dry experimentation. And
when he compared his electrical figures with dendritic ice-fingers on a window
pane in winter, we can now see that his penchant for poetic metaphor put him
unwittingly on the right track.
Fig. 3.9: Electrical discharges are branched formations that resemble crack
patterns, as shown here in the spark pattern from an electrode on the surface of a
glass plate (a). These so-called dielectric breakdown patterns can be ‘frozen’ and
preserved when the passage of current heats up a solid substance and cracks or
vaporizes it (b). The beautiful structures that result are called Lichtenberg
figures. A lightning discharge in the atmosphere is also an example of dielectric
breakdown, with a similarly branched pattern (c). (Photos and images: a, After
Niemeyer et al., 1986; b, Kenneth Brecher, Boston University; c, Michael
Mortenson.)
 Lutz Niemeyer and his colleagues chose to model the dielectric breakdown
process by considering a regular checkerboard lattice on which charge could
flow from point to point in straight lines. The discharge advances one lattice site
at a time, and there are generally several directions it could travel next (Fig.
3.10). Which way does it go? The researchers assumed that the discharge passes
at random to any of the next accessible points at each time step, but with a bias
that depends on the strength of the electric field at that point; in other words,
there might be (say) a 70 per cent chance that it will move to an adjacent site
where the electric field is high, and a 30 per cent chance that it will move to a
position where the field is lower. This is a reasonable thing to assume, since the
passage of the spark can indeed be expected to be governed by the electric field
it encounters en route. Here again we see a delicate balance of chance and
necessity: in the evolution of the discharge route, nothing is certain but some
things are more likely than others. There is randomness, but not that alone.
Fig. 3.10: In the dielectric breakdown model, an electrical discharge advances
between adjacent points on a regular lattice. There are in general many different
points to which the discharge could flow next—here I show the course of the
discharge in black, and the choices for its next step in white. (The discharge
began at the centre of the image, the circled black grid point.) The next step for
the discharge is selected at random but with a probability that is biased by the
strength of the electric field at each of the candidate points. (After Niemeyer et
al., 1984.)

The electric field around the tips of a branching discharge is higher than that
in the valleys and clefts, so advance from the tips is more likely than advance
from the interior of the ‘spark’. That is just how it is for DLA clusters, too, and
for an entirely analogous reason: in that case, the probability of a new particle
striking the tips is higher. It is no surprise, then, that the dielectric breakdown
model produces ramified, tenuous discharge patterns that look very much like
DLA clusters (Fig. 3.11a). If the probability of the discharge flowing to a new
site is assumed to vary in direct proportion to the electric field at that site, then
the patterns predicted by this model have a fractal dimension of 1.75—almost
the same as that of DLA.
Fig. 3.11: The dielectric breakdown model generates branching fractal patterns
very similar to those seen in diffusion-limited aggregation (a). They have a
fractal dimension of about 1.75. This model can be adapted to describe the
propagation of cracks in a brittle material, represented as a lattice of particles
linked by bonds. If the bonds are considered to be a little elastic, able to stretch
and relax in response to stresses, the branching pattern is more tenuous (b).
(Images: a, Luciano Pietronero, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’; b, Paul
Meakin, University of Oslo.)
 The dielectric breakdown model can be imported wholesale into a theory of
fracture in disordered materials. All this entails is to regard the discharge as a
crack, and the lattice as a network of interconnected atoms or particles joined by
chemical bonds. At each time step, the crack takes a pace forward as a new bond
breaks, and the probability of that happening at any site adjacent to the crack’s
periphery depends on how big the stress is there. The stress field varies in just
the same way as an electric field: it is greatest at the tips of the crack and is
smaller in the crevices, just as Griffith said.
But this is a very simplistic picture of fracture. For one thing, it insists that a
bond must break with every time step—the only question is which it will be. In
reality, though, there is no reason why that should happen if the stress simply
isn’t large enough. A better model could allow bonds to stretch a little without
breaking, so that they are not like rigid rods but more like springs. In that case,
each time a bond breaks it will release local stress as the surrounding bonds
relax. ‘Elastic’ models like this generate a range of different fracture patterns,
depending on what is assumed about the bonds’ elasticity. The example in Fig.
3.11b shows a crack that has a much less dense network of branches than those
generated by the rigid-bond dielectric-breakdown model, and looks rather more
like the kind of pattern you might finds creeping ominously across the ceiling.
The fractal dimension here is 1.16, confirming that the crack is less like a two-
dimensional cluster and more like a wiggly line.

PATTERNS IN THE DRY SEASON

All these cracks start at a single point; but that is not always the way it works. In
the hard mud of a dried-up pond, there is no centre to the network of cracks: the
rupturing happens everywhere at once, creating a reticulated web (Fig. 3.12). As
the wet mud of the pond bed becomes exposed and dried, water withdraws from
between the silt particles and they draw closer together. The whole surface layer
contracts. But it cannot simply shrink like a dried-up piece of fruit, because this
dry layer adheres to the damper mud below, which is still expanded by water.
This means that stresses build up everywhere in the surface layer. When the
stresses get big enough, cracks start to appear, creeping through the hard mud
and intersecting to carve it up into islands.
Fig. 3.12: When a thin layer of material is stressed as it shrinks, it may fragment
into a series of islands. This process is familiar in the mud on the bed of dried-up
ponds and lakes. (Photo: Sean McGee.)

This kind of cracking due to uniform shrinkage (or expansion) of a thin layer
of material ‘pinned’ by adhesion to another surface is very common. It is apt to
afflict a coat of paint as the material on which it sits expands or contracts: a
piece of wood swells or shrinks as the humidity changes, say, or metal expands
as it warms. This is the cause of the mesh of hairline cracks that weaves across
old paintings, known to art historians as craquelure. The resulting patterns offer
a subtle fingerprint of authenticity: they may vary, for example, according to
where and when the picture was painted—there are French, Italian, Dutch and
Flemish ‘styles’ of craquelure. The cracking pattern provides clues about the
artist’s materials and techniques, or the history of the painting: how it was
handled, transported, and changes in its ambient environment. So art
conservators have developed sophisticated methods for digitally scanning
paintings to identify and classify the craquelure pattern. Forgers, meanwhile,
have attempted to mimic it by baking their works; they have even been known to
resort to the crude method of painting a fine web of craquelure by hand—a
deception that might fool the eye of a careless buyer but which would be
immediately obvious under a magnifying glass.
Cracking of thin layers poses a big challenge for several advanced
technologies. Surface coatings that are deposited ‘wet’ to protect or modify a
material, for example conferring wear-resistance or low reflectivity, may shrink
as they dry or cool, threatening to leave them cracked and flaking. Integrated
microelectronic devices often incorporate a thin film of one crystalline material
(an insulator perhaps) laid down on top of another (a semiconductor, say) in
which the spacing between the atoms is slightly different, forcing the top layer to
expand or contract. So there are good reasons for wanting to understand what
determines the crack patterns that form.
Arne Skjeltorp from the Institute for Energy Technology in Norway has
explored this type of fracture with what one might call an ‘ideal mud’: a
suspension of microscopic spheres of polystyrene in water. All the microspheres
are the same size, each measuring just a few thousandths of a millimetre in
diameter, and Skjeltorp trapped a single layer of them between two sheets of
glass and let the water slowly evaporate. The particles clump together just like
silt particles in pond mud, and the layer contracts as water disappears. But the
identical size and shape of the spheres means that they pack together more
regularly than silt, forming orderly hexagonal arrays that are also good mimics
of atoms packed in crystalline films.
Fig. 3.13: The cracks in a layer of microscopic plastic particles suspended in water
—a kind of ‘ideal mud’—as it dries. Because the particles are identical in size
and packed in a hexagonal array, the cracks tend to follow the lines between
rows of particles and therefore intersect at angles of about 120°. This is
particularly evident in the early stages of cracking (a). The final crack pattern (b,
c) looks similar at different scales of magnification, at least until we reach the
scale at which individual particles can be seen (c). The region in b is about one
millimetre across; that in c is ten times smaller. (Images: Arne Skjeltorp,
Institute for Energy Technology, Kjeller.)
 Skjeltorp found that as the layer dries, it fractures into complex ‘crazy paving’
patterns like those of dry mud (Fig. 3.13). The web of cracks looks similar at
different scales of magnification: again it is fractal, with a fractal dimension of
about 1.68. But there are signs of orderliness here: the cracks have preferred
directions, tending to intersect at angles of 120°, particularly in the early stages
of drying. This simply reflects the symmetry of the underlying lattice of
particles: the cracks tend to open up between rows of particles. The particles in
mud are packed together in a much more disorderly fashion, and so the shapes of
the final islands are less regular. The physicist Paul Meakin at the University of
Oslo has adapted the ‘elastic’ dielectric breakdown model to this situation, and
found that it produces crack patterns similar to those observed (Fig. 3.14).
But many more familiar examples of cracking are rather different from this.
For mud drying on a lake bed, paint and varnish drying on canvas or wood, or a
ceramic glaze hardening and ageing on a piece of pottery, the cracking layer is
fixed to a surface on one side while being freely exposed to air on the other. In
such cases, the crack pattern often takes on a rather different appearance (Fig.
3.15a). Some cracks seem to advance in straight or curved lines without splitting
or bending sharply for long distances, while other cracks divide up the space in
between. This breaks the material into fragments that typically have four sides,
many of which are square or rectangular. In the final patterns these domains have
a ‘typical’ size that depends on the thickness of the cracked layer—which means
that this crack pattern is not a fractal. And despite the right-angled nature of the
junctions, the pattern is not simply a square or rectangular grid, like the grid-iron
street plan of Manhattan: the junctions are staggered, so that domains tend to
share edges not with four but with six neighbours.
Fig. 3.14: A modified form of the dielectric breakdown model can reproduce the
fracture patterns seen in contracting thin films. (Image: Paul Meakin, University
of Oslo.)

Fig. 3.15: A crack pattern in the glaze of a ceramic plate forms a web in which the
fracture lines tend to intersect at right angles and the islands have an average of
four sides (a). The cracking happens in a hierarchical manner: first, the longest
cracks form, and gradually the spaces between them become laced with bridging
cracks (b). (Photos: Steffen Bohn, The Rockefeller University, New York.)
 Steffen Bohn of the Rockefeller University in New York and his co-workers
have shown that in this case the crack network forms in stages: first by the
appearance of long, smooth cracks, and then by the successive division of the
space in between them as smaller cracks bridge the gaps (Fig. 3.15b). When an
advancing crack intersects with an existing fracture line, stress is relieved most
effectively if the junction makes a right angle. The new crack may bend in order
to satisfy this condition. Bohn and his colleagues have shown how this pattern of
cracks can be analysed to deduce the order in which the cracks formed, and thus
to reconstruct the history of the fracturing.
The process is not unlike the way new urban roads are built between existing
ones, which is why the resulting crack pattern shows similarities with town road
networks. This is seen most clearly in older cities where the streets were laid
down spontaneously, without a planner’s overarching vision: in Paris, say, but
not in New York (Fig. 3.16). Here the initial long cracks are the oldest roads,
leading from the city centre to surrounding villages or abbeys. Paths and lanes
sprang off from these main arteries, perhaps initially to give carts access to
fields.
These informal routes became streets as the urban centre expanded. Right-angled
T-junctions offer the most direct routes between one artery and another, and so
the road network evolves in a hierarchy of subdivisions, just like a cracking film.
If Bohn’s theory is right, then, a street map too encodes its own history.
Fig. 3.16: Hierarchical crack patterns with four-sided domains resemble the street
networks seen in old cities that have grown spontaneously, as shown here for a
map of Paris from 1760. (From an image kindly supplied by Steffen Bohn.)

THE DEVIL’S HONEYCOMB

In the polygonal islands of these crack patterns, traced out by cracks that
intersect with near-geometric precision, we might begin to discern the outlines of
the prismatic columns of the Giant’s Causeway. But the answer is not as simple
as that. For one thing, those rock pillars did not form in a thin layer, but are the
result of a hexagonal web of fractures that passes downwards almost unchanged
through many metres of basalt. And we cannot ascribe these hexagons to any
underlying hexagonal packing of constituent particles, as in the case of the
drying layers of identical microspheres. Any explanation will have to work a
little harder than that.
Whatever the cause of the causeway, it must be a rather unusual one. Basaltic
lava has flowed from many places on the Earth, but few of these igneous
deposits have cracked in such regular array as they cool (another example is the
Devil’s Postpile in California). Yet the process has been seen to occur in other
materials too. In 1922 a British optical engineer named J. W. French studied the
cracking of starch—a slurry of tiny particles, not dissimilar to mud—as it dries.
His experiment was part of a programme designed to mimic the cracking of
glass, but French found that drying starch breaks up into columns: a kind of
mini-Giant’s Causeway, as he recognized. The work was all but forgotten until
Gerhard Muüller of the J. W. Goethe University in Frankfurt repeated the
experiment in 1998. He found that layers of starch several centimetres thick
fractured into columns a few millimetres wide.* Stephen Morris and his
colleague Lucas Goehring at the University of Toronto in Canada repeated this
experiment in 2006, with the same result (Fig. 3.17).
The cracking of the Giant’s Causeway began at the top, where the heat
escaped and the molten rock was therefore coolest. The network of cracks
formed there will have gradually advanced downwards into the solidifying rock
bed. But this does not seem to have happened smoothly: instead, the fracture
pattern progressed downwards in layered steps, each successive layer freezing
and cracking before the next. We can see that this was so because it has left
horizontal striations in the surfaces of the basalt pillars.
This gave physicists Eduardo Jagla of the Centro Atòmico Bariloche in
Argentina and Alberto Rojo of the University of Michigan a vital clue to the way
the prismatic columns were created. In 2002 they proposed that the crack
network in the initial layers was much more irregular, but that it became
progressively more orderly and polygonal as it propagated deeper. For a fixed
total length of cracks, a polygonal, roughly hexagonal network is more effective
than a random jumble at releasing the stress that builds up in the cooling and
contracting layer of rock. This is somewhat comparable to the way that a
hexagonal honeycomb network of soap films in a foam provides the least total
surface area and therefore the lowest-energy configuration, as I explained in
Book I. The uppermost layers of the rock cannot ‘find’ this optimal pattern,
however, because the cracks just start anywhere at random and advance until
they meet another. But as each successive layer freezes and ruptures, this crack
network gets reorganized so that it takes on an increasingly polygonal shape.
Once such a network is attained—and it does not have to be perfectly hexagonal,
but only roughly so—it remains fixed, since further reorganization would not
significantly improve the way stress is relieved. At that point, then, the network
stays identical from one layer to the next, creating vertical-sided columns.
Fig. 3.17: An artificial Giants’s Causeway made from columns of corn starch left
to desiccate in a thick layer (a). The ruler at the top, marked in millimetres,
shows the scale. A columnar structure like this in basaltic rock can be found in
other parts of the world besides Staffa and the Giant’s Causeway, such as in this
formation near Banks Lake in Washington State (b). (Photos: Stephen Morris,
University of Toronto. b, from Goehring et al., 2006.)

A process like this in which irregular cracking of the uppermost layers

becomes marshalled into a stable polygonal network as the cracks descend was
in fact suggested in 1983 by Irish physicists Denis Weaire and Conor O’Carroll
in Dublin, who in turn got the idea from the American metallurgist Cyril Stanley
Smith. (Weaire says that the notion of descending ‘crack layers’ goes back
further still.) But they had no evidence that it could work. Jagla and Rojo
showed that it might: they tested their idea using computer simulations of a
layer-wise cracking process. The first layer had a jumbled web of branching
cracks, but by the eighth layer this had become tidied up into polygons that then
changed hardly at all in lower layers (Fig. 3.18). Most of these polygons are six-
sided (the number ranges from four to eight), and they all have roughly the same
size. This looks very much like the pattern seen in the Giant’s Causeway (Fig.
3.2c). Better still, the researchers showed that both the relative proportions of
polygonal crosssections with different numbers of sides, and the relationship
between the number of sides and the area of the polygons, closely match those
observed in the geological formation.
If this picture is correct, where are the original, more disorderly upper layers
of the Giant’s Causeway? As with many rock formations, they have most
probably been stripped away long ago by wind, rain, and sea. But Morris and
Goehring verified that prismatic pillars may appear in this manner with their
experiments on desiccating starch, where they found that an early jumble of
descending cracks does indeed find its own pseudo-geometric order (Fig. 3.17a).
The final stable pattern depends on several factors, in particular the cooling or
drying rate of the material. Morris and Goehring found that each set of
experimental conditions seems to offer a range of different average pillar widths,
and it is not obvious which of these will be selected in a particular case: this may
depend, for example, on the previous history of the process. The sizes of all the
columns can change suddenly as some descending cracks run out of steam and
the others rearrange themselves. In other words, specific polygonal crack
patterns may be selected from a range of possibilities: all may be more or less
hexagonal, but the scale varies. You could say that the propensity for patterning
is inherent in the process of solidification, but the precise pattern that results
(and in particular, the size of its elements) depends partly on the whims of the
elements. So once again, chance and necessity supply the choreography.
Fig. 3.18: Computer simulations of the successive ordering of cracks in a substance
that solidifies layer by layer show that they can evolve from a rather random
array to one that has largely hexagonal domains. (After Jagla and Rojo, 2002.)
 4
WATER WAYS

Labyrinths in the Landscape

Rivers, like all things linked to water, are popular metaphors. They speak of time
and life and journeys, of blood and tranquillity and turmoil. The metaphors shift,
however, and are liable to trip us up. If life is a river, what is the Styx? Rivers
nurtured the earliest civilizations, but periodically decimated them.
When the biologist Richard Dawkins compared evolution to a river in his
book River Out of Eden, he had in mind both the notion of time’s flow and the
luxuriant branches of the phylogenetic tree that connects all species. This is a
vivid image, but it’s best not to think too hard about it—for the river’s source
lies in its tips, not in the channel to which all tributaries converge.∗
That is the odd thing about rivers: their networks grow in the opposite
direction to the way the water flows, their headwaters cutting backwards into
rock. There is a very real sense in which we can regard a river as a crack,
propagating slowly across a range of hills or mountains.∗∗ Yet there is no
‘pressure’ pushing the tips forward. All the same, the result (Fig. 4.1) is a pattern
that looks rather like the branched formations we have seen already: not only
cracks but sooty aggregates, bacterial colonies, and electrical discharges.
In fact, rivers are arguably the grandfather of branching patterns: the first that
were ever contemplated in terms of their formal shape. Leonardo da Vinci,
whom we encountered in Book II as a pioneer of fluid flow patterns, sketched
the most extraordinary topographical maps of rivers and their watersheds, in
which the mountains are represented not, in the medieval manner, as so many
stylized conical profiles, but with shading that shows something like a contour or
tree line (Fig. 4.2). It is as if he really took to the skies in one of his flying
machines to obtain this bird’s eye view, from where the ferny fractal fronds of
the river basin look eerily like those evident in today’s satellite imagery (Plate
6). Leonardo had good reason to strive for this accuracy, since these were most
probably plans for his hydraulic engineering schemes, such as the construction
of canals on the River Arno in Tuscany. Yet for all his practicality, Leonardo’s
vision was also informed by his metaphysical convictions: when he called rivers
the ‘blood of the earth’, this allusion to the venous structure of the network was
not just pretty word-play but was rooted in Neoplatonism. He firmly believed
that structures found on a grand scale in nature—the macrocosm—would be
reiterated in the body of man, the microcosm. We will see shortly that he was not
mistaken in this regard. Not only do these forms look alike, but they may well
have the same ultimate cause.
Fig. 4.1: River networks: geomorphological cracks on a grand scale? Here is the
drainage basin of the Dry Tug Fork in California. (Image:Andrea Rinaldo.)

Fig. 4.2: Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘aerial’ sketch of a river network and the
surrounding topography looks strikingly like the fractal forms seen in today’s
satellite imagery (Plate 6).
 SCALING UP STREAMS

For geomorphologists (those scientists who study the shapes of landforms) the
branching patterns of rivers were one of the most prominent features of natural
landscapes, and demanded explanation. The first attempt to formulate one was
made by the American hydrologist and engineer Robert E. Horton in the 1930s,
who proposed that there are universal ‘laws of drainage network composition’.
These laws are now generally cited in the modified form defined in 1952 by
geomorphologist Arthur Strahler. Each branch of the river network is assigning
an ‘order’ that signifies its position in the hierarchy. The streams at the tips,
which themselves have no tributaries, are first order. Where two firstorder
streams join, the resulting stream is second order; and in general, the meeting of
two streams of a given order signals the beginning of a stream of next highest
order (Fig. 4.3). If a lower-order stream flows into a higher-order stream, the
former terminates but the latter’s order is unchanged.
Horton claimed that these stream orders obeyed certain mathematical
regularities. His ‘law of stream numbers’ states how the number of streams of a
particular order depends in a predictable way on the order. It is clear from
looking at a drainage network that there are fewer higher-order streams than
lower-order. Horton expressed this with mathematical precision: the number of
streams of order n is proportional to the inverse of a constant C raised to the
power n. The number of second-order streams is proportional to C2, third-order
to C3, and so on. This law is an example of a power law or scaling law (see page
35). Another way of expressing this idea is to say that the number of streams in
each order is a constant times the number in the next highest order. The number
of firstorder streams in a particular network might, for example, be four times
the number of second-order streams, which is itself four times the number of
third-order, and so on. This would mean that each stream has, on average, four
branching streams of the preceding order.
Fig. 4.3: The hierarchy of river network elements in Strahler’s modification of
Horton’s classification scheme. The order assigned to each branch increases as
one progresses from initial tributaries to the main river channel.

Horton also proposed a scaling law for stream lengths: the average length of a
stream of order n is proportional to a (different) constant D raised to the power n.
(Or again: the average length for each order is a constant times the average
length of the preceding order.) Thus, streams of higher order are longer—again
what you would anticipate intuitively from looking at the drainage map. A third
scaling law relates the downstream slope of a stream to its order. In 1956 the
American geomorphologist Stanley Schumm proposed a fourth law, in the same
spirit: the area of the drainage basin feeding a stream with water increases with
stream order in the same way as stream length: that is, proportional to a constant
raised to the power n. And a year later a geologist named John Hack added one
more scaling relationship, pointing out that the area of the full drainage basin for
a network increases in proportion to the length of the principal river (that is, the
highest-order element of the network) raised to the power of about 0.6. Hack’s
law seems to be more or less true for drainage networks ranging in size from
those produced in small laboratory experiments to those almost as big as the
Amazon. But there is some dispute about the precise value of Hack’s exponent:
some estimates place it closer to 0.5, while others think it does not really have a
universal value at all, but varies slightly from place to place. It appears, in fact,
that the spread in observed values of Hack’s law is related to the fact that river
basins seem to become elongated (they get narrower) as they get bigger.
These scaling laws are really expressions of the fractal, self-similar character
of drainage networks. They are reflections of the fact that the structures look the
same over a wide range of magnification scales, so that you might not know
from an aerial photo if you are looking at an area a mile across or a hundred
miles. Where does this fractality come from? And can we explain why the
networks follow these particular scaling laws, and not others?
When Horton first reported his laws they were regarded with awe, as though
uncovering a profound natural regularity. But in 1962 Luna Leopold and Walter
Langbein showed that randomness alone is enough to ensure that these
relationships hold for any branching network. They proposed a model of stream
formation based on that developed by Horton himself, according to which
networks emerge as rain falls onto a gently undulating surface. Wherever rain
delivers more water than can be removed by filtering down through the rock bed,
water accumulates on the surface and flows down the steepest gradient. These
are not really streams, but so-called ‘rills’—they don’t ‘go’ anywhere in
particular, but just cover the land surface with little gullies that grow bigger and
deeper as the water erodes the surface. As rills grow larger, they begin to merge.
In the model developed by Leopold and Langbein, rills form at random and
larger channels arise from the merging of smaller ones. Because the surface
topography is random, the rills evolve in random wiggles, constrained only by
the fact that, like streams, they cannot re-cross their own tracks (a property
called self-avoidance). This model generates networks that obey Horton’s laws
as if by magic, even though its ingredients reflect only the barest details of the
real geological processes.
In 1966 the geomorphologist Ronald Shreve showed that in fact Horton’s
laws are extremely likely to result from any process that connects at random a
given number of stream sources in a drainage basin into a network. And the
geomorphologist James Kirchner demonstrated in 1993 that even randomness is
not essential: almost every kind of branched network conceivable obeys Horton’s
laws, not just those arising from random processes. In other words, Horton’s
laws don’t really tell us anything at all about the fundamental patterns of stream
networks. They are probably instead an inevitable consequence of the scheme
that Horton (and subsequently Strahler) used to break down the networks into
fundamental units of different order. So it is no good testing a particular model
of drainage network development by seeing if it generates Horton’s laws,
because just about any model will do that.
This is a salutary tale. You see a pattern and you discover that it conforms to a
particular mathematical description, and so you think that the maths captures the
essence of the pattern. But it may be that lots of other patterns follow that same
mathematical law, while differing in other ways. That is a particular hazard of
research on fractals: a fractal dimension is a useful measure, for example, but it
is not a unique fingerprint of the pattern.

INVASION OF THE HIGHLANDS

In any case, it is now clear that drainage networks do not usually form by the
random appearance of rills followed by their merging. Instead, a network grows
from the heads (tips) of the channels, where erosional processes cut back into the
rock. To understand why networks have the form they do, we must therefore
focus on what is happening here at the stream heads.
Cutting into rock requires energy. In stream networks this comes from the
kinetic energy of rainwater or melt water flowing downhill. The energy input is
greatest where the water flows fastest and most abundantly: where steep slopes
converge in the funnel-shaped head of the channels. Downstream, the flow is
more sluggish and erosion is less urgent. So the network grows from the branch
tips—just as it does for cracks, lightning, or viscous fingering, where the branch
tips are the places of steepest gradient in stress, electric field or pressure. And
once again there is an instability that amplifies growth: when a new channel
forms, it becomes a focus for the flow of surface water, producing further
erosion.
But this does not mean that rivers can lengthen, and new branches form, only
at the outermost tips, just as it is not so for electrical discharges or cracks. As in
those cases, chance plays a role. All landscapes have random variations: in
surface contours, soil type and permeability, rock type, vegetation cover, and so
forth. This is the equivalent of the randomness of particle trajectories in
diffusion-limited aggregation, say, and it ensures that there is always a chance
that new tributaries may sprout downriver, on the higher-order streams of
Horton’s classification rather than only at the firstorder stream heads. The
chance is relatively smaller, because much of the water that falls on the ground
already bounded by channels will be captured by them instead. But the
possibility exists. So river networks grow like the other randomly branched
patterns we have noted already: prey to randomness everywhere, but biased by
preferential growth at the tips.
As Leopold and Langbein observed, drainage networks tend to be self-
avoiding: stream heads hardly ever cut back across other streams to create
islands or loops. This is because, as a stream head advances towards an existing
channel, the area feeding it with water diminishes, since the other channel claims
an increasing proportion of the water supply. Stream heads therefore generally
run out of steam (or more properly, of water!) before they intersect other
streams. Analogously, the tips of a DLA cluster very rarely intersect other
branches because new particles cannot reach them once they get too close to
another branch.
The connection between drainage network formation and crack formation is
made explicit in a network-forming model called invasion percolation.
Percolation is the passage of a fluid through a porous substance. David
Wilkinson and J. F. Willemsen, working at the oil mining company
Schlumberger-Doll in Connecticut, devised the invasion percolation model in
1983 to describe how one fluid pushes another through a network of pores: a key
process in oil recovery by injection of water into the oilfield. We have seen how
this process can create branching instabilities that lead to viscous fingering
patterns. But in invasion percolation the fluids are contained in a web of pores
that imposes its own pattern, so that the invading fluid advances in a densely
interweaving network (Fig. 4.4). In effect, the invading fluid pushes into a
surrounding matrix in a way that is governed by the pores.
The probability that the invading fluid displaces the other depends on the size
of the pore through which it passes, since this modifies the fluid pressure. If the
pore network has a random distribution of pore sizes, then this probability varies
more or less randomly through the system: there is an equal chance of a branch
tip advancing at any point. The invasion percolation model captures this process
by considering the invading fluid to be advancing as a ‘cluster’ through a lattice
of obstacles linked together by bonds whose strength varies randomly from place
to place. The fluid network grows by breaking these bonds and pushing between
the obstacles, like flood waters breaking down barriers. The next bond to break
is always assumed to be whichever is the weakest one around the perimeter of
the cluster. You can now see that this model is very similar to the dielectric
breakdown model described in the previous chapter, except that there is no
ambiguity about which is the next bond to break: it is always the weakest,
whereas in the dielectric breakdown model weaker bonds simply have a
proportionately greater probability of breaking.
Fig. 4.4: Invasion percolation: the displacement of one fluid by another within a
porous network. The ‘invading’ fluid is injected here at the point marked with a
circle, and moves forward in a dense, convoluted system of loops and branches.
(Image: Roland Lenormand, Institut Francçais du Petrole, Rueil-Malmaison.)
 The advance of an invasion percolation cluster occurs mostly at the tips,
because the rules of bond breakage mean that the cluster naturally ‘seeks out’ the
weakest bonds in its path and leaves behind along its perimeter those bonds that
are stronger. The chance of finding a bond at the tips that is weaker than those
still unbroken deeper inside the cluster is usually pretty good; only rarely will all
the tips happen to alight on strong bonds, forcing the breakage of one further
back down the cluster’s branches. The cluster grows into fractal form.
Fig. 4.5: The self-avoiding invasion percolation model of river network formation
produces networks resembling those carved out as rivers cut back into bedrock.
(After Stark, 1991.)
 The British geomorphologist Colin Stark has proposed that the evolution of
drainage networks is rather like invasion percolation. The breaking of bonds
mimics the erosion of bedrock by a steady supply of surface water from rainfall;
and the randomness in bond strengths reflects the non-uniformity of the
landscape. To apply the model to this situation, he imposed one extra constraint
—self-avoidance—so that a stream head may not intersect an existing channel.
Stark showed that this model produced stream networks that looked rather
realistic (Fig. 4.5). And he found that his model networks obey Hack’s scaling
law with an exponent of about 0.56, matching the value of 0.5–0.6 seen in
nature.
However, like all simple models that have been proposed for explaining the
form of river networks, the invasion percolation model only gets part of the
pattern right. For one thing, snapping bonds in a lattice is not really much like
erosion and sediment transport in real rivers. And sometimes three or more
tributaries converge in Stark’s networks, whereas this rarely happens in real river
networks. Furthermore, it is a little unsatisfying that self-avoidance must be
imposed rather than arising naturally in the model. In other words, there is more
going on than mere invasion percolation in the formation of a river network.
Nature tells us this must be so, because, like trees, river patterns do not all look
the same.
Several alternative models offer a similar combination of landscape
randomness and growth instabilities that promote branching, and almost all of
them produce fractal patterns, along with fair agreement with some of the
scaling laws seen in the natural networks. On this evidence, then, it seems there
is no unique way to describe the formation of river networks. We know the basic
principles, but it is not clear which details are essential and which are incidental.
And how well a model mimics the real world may depend on which rivers we
choose for the comparison. This is all rather unsatisfactory.

THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS

What is needed is a broader perspective. Instead of a river winding through the

landscape, think for a moment about an apparently simpler problem: the path of
an object falling under the influence of gravity. It could be a cannonball fired
from a cannon, or a pen rolling off a tabletop, or a raindrop released from a
cloud. How can we calculate the trajectory? Newton’s laws of motion provide
the rules, telling us which forces act on the body. But these laws rarely supply a
very easy prescription for calculating the trajectories that result. A better way of
determining the paths of moving bodies was devised in the late eighteenth
century by the French mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange, and modified half
a century later by the Irish mathematician William Hamilton. Lagrangian and
Hamiltonian mechanics are equivalent to Newtonian mechanics, but instead of
formulating the problem in terms of forces, they consider the energies involved
—for example, the changes in the gravitational potential energy as an object
falls, and its kinetic energy due to motion. This makes the job easier, and it
provides a general criterion for the trajectory of a falling object, or indeed of any
moving object: the path taken is that which minimizes a quantity called the
action, which depends on the energy changes involved in the motion and the
time taken for it to happen.
The Venezuelan environmental engineer Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, the Italian
physicist Andrea Rinaldo, and their colleagues think that there is an analogous
‘minimization’ principle guiding a natural river drainage network into a
branched, fractal structure. The network evolves, they say, in such a way as to
minimize the rate at which the mechanical potential energy of the water flowing
through the network is expended. This claim needs a little unpacking.
As water flows downhill through a river network, it loses potential energy just
as a falling cricket ball does. This is converted mostly into kinetic energy: the
water moves. And the kinetic energy ultimately drives the process of erosion that
leads the network to expand and rearrange its course. So the potential energy is
ultimately dissipated: some of it goes into kinetic energy of the river water
discharging into the sea (or at least, out of the drainage basin), while some is lost
as frictional heat by the wearing away of rock and soil.
Suppose we had a divine ability to measure everywhere at once the amount of
potential energy that all the water was losing each second. (We cannot hope to
do this in real river systems, but it is something that can be easily totted up in
computer models.) Rodriguez-Iturbe’s minimization principle says that the
network will evolve until it acquires the shape for which the total rate of
potential energy dissipation is as small as possible.
It was not a totally new notion. The analysis of river drainage patterns
conducted by Luna Leopold and his co-workers in the 1960s led him to conclude
that these networks represent an optimal compromise between two opposing
tendencies: for the expenditure of power by water flow to be as small as possible
(which is more or less equivalent to Rodriguez-Iturbe’s minimal energy
dissipation), and for the power of the flow to be distributed more or less equally
throughout the system. Leopold suggested that the river network evolves into a
state where these things are balanced.∗
To investigate what sort of network their model generates, Rodriguez-Iturbe
and his colleagues ‘evolved’ a network created purely at random into one that
obeyed their minimization principle; that is to say, they started with a network
drawn on a checkerboard grid, in which water falling uniformly on each grid cell
was drained along channels connected randomly from cell to cell (with the
proviso that channels could not cross) into a network that ultimately flowed out
of one corner. Then they rearranged the channels one cell at a time, calculating at
each step how this affected the total rate of energy dissipation. Each change was
made at random, but was ‘accepted’ only if it produced a decrease in this total
rate—if not, the change was discarded and another one was tried. This process
can generate a wide range of networks, and each ‘run’ will create a different one.
But all of them turn out to look realistic: they have scaling properties that obey
Horton’s laws, Hack’s law, and several other empirical laws of river patterns too.
Rodriguez-Iturbe and colleagues calls this set of possible solutions ‘optimal
channel networks’.
This seemed to suggest that the form of the network was indeed governed by
the rule that energy dissipation from flow and erosion would be kept as small as
possible: in this sense, the water flow will search out the ‘best’ solution. But can
that really be so? It would be extraordinary if it was. If you think of a typical
river running over a hilly landscape, the number of possible routes it might take
is astronomical. The chance that the single ‘best’ route will be found is therefore
utterly tiny, and indeed this is not really what happens. Instead, nature finds river
network structures that are simply ‘good enough’: they might not be the best
possible, but they are each the best in the neighbourhood. In an entirely
analogous way, water flowing down a mountain range sometimes gathers in
mountain lakes: the water could lower its energy still further if it found a way
out of the lake and right down to the valley floor, but it cannot easily do that, and
so gets stuck in the ‘local minimum’ of the lake. There are many alternative
networks with broadly similar shapes that correspond to these local minima of
the energy dissipation rate, and they are all, in a parochial rather than a global
sense, optimal channel networks.
Why should river networks ‘seek’ to minimize their energy expenditure in the
first place? Initially, Rodriguez-Iturbe and colleagues merely assumed that they
did, and showed that this assumption gave realistic branching patterns. They did
not initially attempt to justify the assumption. Kevin Sinclair and Robin Ball of
Cambridge University tried to explain how the energy-minimization principle
arises from the fundamental flow and erosion processes that govern network
evolution. They deduced that the mathematical equations relating the water flow
rate and the amount of erosion look like those that appear in Hamilton’s law of
least action. In other words, within the flow of a single stream of water over
open ground lies the prescription for the shape of the Amazon. But of course one
could never guess at that pattern by staking out a lone channel with any number
of flow meters, depth gauges and so forth. The branching pattern is what
emerges when that process is reiterated everywhere at once. And no two patterns
are alike: they are all encoded in the physics of flow and erosion, baut not
uniquely defined by it.
Rinaldo, Rodriguez-Iturbe and their colleagues went on to make this
connection more concrete by finding a completely different way to generate
optimal channel networks, based on the erosional processes that happen in real
river flow. They considered what would happen as rain falls uniformly onto a
high plain whose roughness is totally random. A surface of this sort is more like
sandpaper than a mountain range: it is uneven, but has no big peaks or deep
valleys. The resulting flows of water create erosion that depends, at each point,
both on the rate of flow and the steepness of the gradient down which the water
runs. Again, the researchers divided up this conceptual landscape into a grid of
cells, and assumed that the water would run out of each cell down the steepest
gradient it can find. This flow can in principle produce erosion of the surface,
but in the model it was assumed to remove and carry away material only when
the flow exceeds some critical threshold value. When this happens, the height of
the landscape at that point is reduced, altering the slope.
Notice that there is nothing in this model to ensure that the flow gets
channelled into a single, connected river network. Yet as the simulation of
landscape erosion proceeds, that is what happens (Fig. 4.6). And these networks
turn out to have the same scaling properties and fractal dimension as the optimal
channel networks produced by the earlier model, which in turn are excellent
mimics of nature. So a set of purely ‘local’ rules that determine how the network
and landscape evolve, describing the kinds of processes that happen in the real
world, is sufficient to ensure that the river network finds its way to the ‘optimal’
shape that minimizes total energy expenditure.
What does the erosional process do to the shape of the landscape itself? I’ll
come back to this shortly.

IT’S SEDIMENTARY

Self-avoidance is the rule for river networks: the channels do not intersect. But
when rivers flow across very flat, broad beds, they often break up into a series of
channels that split and rejoin into a series of loops surrounding islands (Fig. 4.7).
These are called braided rivers. Analogous skeins of water form on a smaller
scale when streams run into the sea across a flat, sandy beach. The dried-up
imprint of what appear to be braided rivers have been seen on Mars. The pattern
appears whenever a broad sheet of water runs over a gently sloping, grainy
sediment.
Fig. 4.6: In this model of river network evolution, water falls on a landscape with a
randomly rough surface and causes erosion as it flows away. The resulting
streams organize themselves into a joined-up river network in which the total
rate of energy dissipation is a local minimum: it has the smallest value of all the
networks with similar configurations. These so-called optimal channel networks
have the same scaling laws as those seen in nature. (Image: Andrea Rinaldo,
University of Padova.)
Fig. 4.7: Braided rivers have channels that loop and converge, creating isolated
islands that form and vanish as the channels change their course. This one is the
Waimakariri river in Canterbury, New Zealand. (Photo: Phillip Capper.)
 ‘The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the Earth’, says the ecological
writer Rachel Carson—to which geologist Chris Paola of the University of
Minnesota adds the frank confession that ‘Unfortunately, this poem is written in
a language we don’t understand.’ But he is one of those working on decoding it.
Paola and his colleague Brad Murray have proposed, for example, that the
transport of suspended sediment is crucial to the formation of braided rivers.
Water scours out sediment in some parts of the flow and re-deposits it elsewhere
to create sandbars and islands. If the rate of sediment removal by scouring
increases sharply as the flow gets faster, then this sets up a positive feedback that
makes a dip in the river bed get ever deeper: the dip captures more of the flow
than the surrounding regions, and so proportionately more sediment is washed
away from it. The reverse is true for a bump: the flow passes around it rather
than over it, and so it suffers less erosion and gets higher than its surroundings.
As a result, random small protrusions become islands that divert the flow to
either side.
Murray and Paola devised a model of flow and erosion that captured these
features. Water flowed across a checkerboard lattice of square cells, whose
heights decreased steadily in one direction to produce a downhill flow.
Superimposed on this smooth slope were small, random variations in height
from cell to cell. The amount of water flowing through each cell depended on its
height in relation to its uphill neighbours: the lower the cell, the greater its share
of water from those uphill. The researchers assigned rules that governed how the
amount of sediment either eroded or deposited at a cell depended on the flow
across it. They found that their model results (Fig. 4.8) captured many of the
features of real braided rivers. Channels continually form and reform, migrate,
split and rejoin: the shape of the river is never steady. Although on average the
flow of water and sediment down the river remains constant, it fluctuates
strongly—more so than in non-braided rivers—because of this constant
reorganization of the flow paths.
Any sandy sea shore will show you that shallow water flowing over grains is
a rich source of pattern. When the water’s edge retreats as waves lap at the
beach, the sand can become moulded into diverse structures; the same patterns
may be seen in the sediment at the bottom of an emptying reservoir. Adrian
Daerr at the Universiteé Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris and his co-workers
studied these patterns in the lab in 2002, using a ‘model shore’ consisting of a
plastic plate covered in a thin layer of sediment (alumina powder, mimicking
sand or mud) and withdrawn slowly from a tank of water at various angles of
inclination. The researchers found that as the angle was made progressively
steeper, there were rather sudden changes in the kind of erosion pattern formed,
from a densely ‘cross-hatched’ texture to branched channels to a dimpled
‘orange-skin’ surface and then to chevrons that overlap like fish scales (Fig. 4.9).
They could not explain all these patterns, but suggested that the chevrons came
about as a result of avalanches of grains down the slope of the sediment layer.
Each avalanche spreads into a chevron, funnelling the flow of water in a way
that sharpens the V shapes by erosion.
Such studies raise at least as many questions as they answer. But all these
erosion patterns are self-organizing, in the sense that the flow becomes organized
into a stable state with properties that remain statistically constant even though
the details are for ever changing. This is a hallmark of self-similar growth, which
allows an object to preserve its form while it grows indefinitely.
Fig. 4.8: A computer model of fluid flow and sediment transport captures the
essential features of braided rivers. The pattern is constantly shifting, as shown
here in three snapshots from a model run. The images on the right show the
topography, and those on the left show the water discharge—essentially, the river
channels themselves. (Image: Chris Paola, University of Minnesota.)
 WHAT’S LEFT

When we think of river patterns, what usually comes to mind is the plan view:
the convergent, branched network as seen from above, which Leonardo intuited
and topographic maps and aerial photographs have now rendered familiar. But
these images do not really reflect our experience of rivers, for what we see
instead from our nose-high view of the world is the effect that the flow has on
the landscape; in other words, we see the rugged profile that the river carves into
the landscape: hills and valleys, gorges, ravines, and lone peaks (Plate 7). There
is a characteristic shape and form in what the river leaves behind, just as there is
in the course it takes.
Fig. 4.9: Sediment erosion patterns in a thin layer of powder withdrawn at an angle
from immersion in water. The pattern depends on the withdrawal rate and angle.
(Photos: Adrian Daerr, ESPCI, Paris.)

While the river network is traced out as a pattern of wiggly lines, the
topographic profile of the watershed is a surface. And just as the fractal nature of
the channel network makes it more than a one-dimensional line, so too the rough
erosion surface is a fractal that partially fills up three-dimensional space and so
has a fractal dimension greater than 2. It is not hard to tell when a landscape is
fractal, because you will soon find that it takes a lot more time and effort to
travel between two points separated by a certain distance as the crow flies than it
would on a flat plain. Journeys in fractal land are arduous.
Fig. 4.10: A fractal boundary, such as a cross-section through a fractal surface, has
a length that depends on the yardstick used to measure it. As the measuring stick
becomes smaller, the apparent length seems to increase as we capture more of
the details. Here the measured length increases slightly each time the measuring
stick is halved in length.

What exactly does it mean, though, for a surface to be fractal? Simply put, it
means that the bumps have no characteristic size scale: they come in all sizes.
Put another way, it means that the apparent area of the surface depends on the
size of the ruler that one uses to measure it. Consider getting from A to B over
such a bumpy surface (Fig. 4.10). How far do you travel? That depends on how
you measure the route: smaller and smaller ‘yardsticks’ capture more and more
of the ups and downs and so the overall measured length gets longer. Of course,
the ‘real’ length doesn’t get any longer—you just ‘see’ more of it. But the
spooky fact is that, on a genuinely fractal landscape, there is no ‘real’ length at
all. Ups and downs exist on all length scales down to the infinitely small, so the
apparent length goes right on increasing as we measure with ever smaller rulers.
As we have seen, true fractals like this are just mathematical abstractions, since
the crenellations of any real boundary cannot get any smaller than the sizes of
atoms. But some physical objects can remain fractal over a wide range of scales
of magnification.
It was this apparent dependence of a rough object’s perimeter length on the
size of the yardstick that led Benoit Mandelbrot to uncover fractal geometry. In
1961 he came across the attempts of the English physicist Lewis Fry Richardson
to specify the length of wiggly coastlines and borders, including the west coast
of Britain and the border of Spain and Portugal. Richardson was interested in the
causes of war and international conflict, and he was drawn to the issue of border
length by thinking about how territorial disputes arise. He found that the
apparent lengths of such boundaries measured from maps depended on the scale
of the map that one used: small-scale maps show more detail than large-scale
ones, and so capture more of the nooks and crannies, making the total length
seem longer. Mandelbrot realized that ‘length’ is in this case not something that
can be meaningfully specified. Instead, the ‘shape’ of the boundary is better
described by calculating how quickly the apparent length increases as the
yardstick gets shorter. This is what the fractal dimension measures: it is an
unchanging geometrical property of the way the convoluted object fills up space.
There is an important subtlety here. I explained earlier that a fractal object
such as a crack or a DLA cluster is self-similar: if you look more closely at any
part of it, you seem to see the same overall shape repeated again. More precisely,
self-similar objects are composed of (approximate) copies of themselves scaled
down by a constant ratio. They have the same fractal dimension in all directions.
Fractal surfaces are not quite like this. Although they have a fractal dimension
of between 2 and 3, indicating that they partially fill up three-dimensional space,
this space-filling is not the same in all directions. We can see this rather easily by
taking cross-sectional slices through a rugged mountainous landscape. A vertical
cut reveals a rising and plunging, but continuous, transect across valleys and
peaks (Fig. 4.11a). But a horizontal cut reveals something else entirely: isolated
‘islands’ separated by empty space (Fig. 4.11b). Such a fractal structure is said to
be self-affine, which crudely means that the ratio by which the elements get
scaled down at successive levels of magnification is different in different
directions.
Mandelbrot realized in the 1970s that the natural topography of the Earth is
typically a self-affine fractal. This was implicit, he said, in a description of
mountain landscapes by the Victorian climber and explorer Edward Whymper in
his book Scrambles Amongst the Alps: ‘It is worthy of remark that . . . fragments
of . . . rock . . . often present the characteristic forms of the cliffs from which
they have been broken.’ Self-affine landscapes can be generated rather easily on
computers, and they supply convincing imitations of real mountains capes (Fig.
4.12) which have been used in Hollywood movies such as Star Trek II: The
Wrath of Khan. The crucial point here is that these landscapes are not simply
random. If you set the computer to generate an image in which the size and
shape of the hills and valleys are assigned by a random-number generator, the
result is a topography that is certainly uneven but looks wrong. Fractal
landscapes are ‘noisy’ and unpredictable, but there is more to them than chance
alone.
Fig. 4.11: A vertical slice through a rugged valley reveals an irregular profile of
peaks and valleys (a). A horizontal cut, meanwhile, isolates islands—contour
lines corresponding to cross-sections of the peaks, separated by gaps (b).

Fig. 4.12: Self-affine fractal landscapes generated by computer look very like real
mountainous terrain. (Image: John Beale.)
 In view of how important fractal coastlines were to the evolution of the
general notion of fractal geometry, it’s surprising that a good model for how
coasts acquire this form by erosion was not developed until 2004. Partly this is
due to the fact that coastal erosion is a complex, many-facetted process. The
pounding of waves can wear away rock, but it also redistributes sand and stones.
Cliff faces are shattered by frost expansion or worn down by rain. And water
induces chemical attrition called weathering, for example by salt corrosion or via
reactions between minerals and water. Rocks weakened by slow chemical
weathering may be broken apart and removed quite suddenly by the violence of
a storm.
Bernard Sapoval at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, and his co-
workers simplified these details by assuming just two kinds of erosion: rapid,
due to the mechanical effects of battering in storms, and slow, due to chemical
weathering. In their model, a coast was represented by a grid of cells containing
several rock types with different resistance to erosion, distributed at random.
They suggested that the key to the evolution of fractal geometry was a feedback
process by which erosion of the coast by waves is altered as the coastline
becomes more convoluted, damping down the waves. Allowing for this effect,
the researchers found that a smooth coast soon breaks up into a rough outline,
which becomes increasingly pitted into bays, peninsulas, and islands (Fig. 4.13).
The erosion process doesn’t just expose the strongest rock—this would result in
a random, non-fractal shape—but maintains a fine balance between removing
the weaker sections and removing those that are most exposed. The model
ignores several aspects of coastline formation that are surely important, not least
the movement of sediment, but nonetheless it seems to capture the most obvious
features of real coasts. They ‘look’ right, for sure.
Fig. 4.13: A coastline carved out by a computer model of erosion (a: the dark area
here is the land) looks similar to a real coast (b: in Sardinia; the boundary is
shown more clearly in c), with peninsulas, bays, and a ragged outline. Both
boundaries are fractal, with the same fractal dimension. (Images: Bernard
Sapoval, CNRS Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau.)

CARRIED AWAY

The self-affine relief of a river basin must be related to the branched structure of
the river network. But how? Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, Andrea Rinaldo, and
their co-workers think that their model of optimal channel networks provides a
link. I showed earlier that in this model, water carves realistic-looking river
networks through a randomly bumpy surface. In doing so, the flow reshapes the
topology of the landscape, sculpting it into peaks and valleys. The initially
sandpaper-like surface deepens into a rugged range of hills and valleys with a
fractal character (Fig. 4.14), very like that of a real landscape. Once this
landscape has attained its fractal state, erosion continues and the shape continues
to change; but the basic form, as characterized by the fractal dimension, remains
constant.
Tamás Vicsek and his co-workers in Budapest have studied this same process
experimentally, using real mud and water. They mixed sand and soil to simulate
the granular, sticky stuff of hillslopes, from which they constructed a flat-topped
ridge just over half a metre long. They sprayed it evenly with water to see what
kind of surface would be carved out by erosion.
The running water carries off material in two ways: the granular substance is
worn down gradually, but from time to time landslides remodel the surface more
abruptly. Both of these processes, of course, occur in real hill and mountain
ranges. The result is a rough, bumpy ridge that one could easily mistake for a
rocky hillslope on a scale thousands of times bigger (Fig. 4.15)—a reflection of
the scale-invariant self-affinity of these erosion surfaces. But you might protest
that mountains are made of rock, not a soft mixture of soil and sand. That is true,
but it may not matter. Both of these substances are worn away by flowing water;
it merely happens much faster in the softer medium. And both have a resistance
to erosion that varies rather randomly from place to place: the sand and soil were
only crudely mixed, and rock is highly non-uniform. Finally, both materials
suffer erosion due to the same two processes: gradual removal of suspended
small particles, and abrupt landslides.
Fig. 4.14: In the optimal channel network model described earlier, a river network
such as that in Fig. 4.6 has an associated topography. The initial landscape is
randomly bumpy, but its profile changes to a fractal form, with hills and valleys
of all sizes and heights. (Image: Andrea Rinaldo, University of Padova.)
 The results, then, are miniature replicas of the world’s most awesome vistas:
demonstrations of how the elemental forces of nature can exhibit a blithe
indifference to scale.

INVERTED ICICLES

The snowfields of the Andes experience a very different kind of erosion process
that creates one of nature’s strangest spectacles. The high glaciers here can
become moulded into a forest of ice spires, typically between 1 and 4 metres
high, called penitentes because of their resemblance to a throng of white-hooded
monks (Fig. 4.16a). Charles Darwin saw these eerie formations in 1835 en route
from Chile to Argentina. ‘In the valleys there were several broad fields of
perpetual snow’, he wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle,
Fig. 4.15: An experiment on erosion of a bed of sand and clay by water produces a
rugged skyline (a) that resembles those seen in nature at scales thousands of
times larger, such as this mountainscape in the Dolomites (b). (Photos: Tamás
Vicsek, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.)

These frozen masses, during the process of thawing, had in some

parts been converted into pinnacles or columns, which, as they
were high and close together, made it difficult for the cargo mules
to pass. On one of these columns of ice, a frozen horse was
sticking as on a pedestal, but with its hind legs straight up in the
air. The animal, I suppose, must have fallen with its head
downward into a hole, when the snow was continuous, and
afterwards the surrounding parts must have been removed by the
thaw.

Fig. 4.16: Ice and snow fields in the Andes can be carved into spikes called
penitentes by the eroding power of sunlight (a). The process has been mimicked
in the laboratory, producing ice spikes just a few centimetres tall (b). (Photos: a,
Cristian Ordenes; b, Vance Bergeron, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyons).
Darwin remarked that the locals believed them to be formed by wind erosion.
But the process is more complicated than that, representing a classic case of
pattern formation by self-amplifying feedback. The air at these great heights is
so dry that sunlight falling on the ice transforms it straight into water vapour
rather than melting it into liquid water. A small dimple that forms in the smooth
ice surface by evaporation acts as a kind of lens that focuses the sun’s rays into
the centre, and so it is excavated more quickly than the surrounding ice. It’s a
little like diffusion-limited aggregation or dendritic growth in reverse: a
‘fingering’ instability penetrates into the ice rather than pushing outwards from
the surface.
The process can be accelerated by a fine coating of dirt on the snow surface.
As the troughs deepen they expose clean snow that is prone to further
evaporation, whereas dirt in the old snow at the peaks covers the ice crystals like
a cap and insulates them. You might expect that, on the contrary, snow or ice will
melt faster when dirty than when clean, because the darker material will absorb
more sunlight. But whether a layer of dirt acts primarily as an insulator or an
absorber depends on how thick it is.
The physicist Vance Bergeron of the Ecole Normale Supeérieure in Lyons and
his co-workers have mimicked this natural process in the laboratory, making
‘mini-penitentes’ by exposing blocks of snow or ice to a bright spotlight. After a
few hours of illumination, tiny peaks just a few centimetres tall appeared in the
ice (Fig. 4.16b). Structures this small are found naturally, and are thought to be
the precursors of full-scale penitentes. It is possible that this process might be
exploited on still smaller scales, using fierce lasers in place of sunlight to erode
the surfaces of silicon wafers used in solar cells. A coating of microscopic
penitente-like peaks could make the silicon less reflective, so that it can capture
more of the sunlight that falls on it. That is the wonder of these pattern-forming
processes: they may operate over such an immense range of scales, from
mountains to molehills to the microworld, and with such indifference to context,
that we can find geology inspiring technology, or biology apeing a snowflake.
 5
TREE AND LEAF

Branches in Biology

The tree (dendros) metaphor is invoked so regularly in scientific descriptions of

branching patterns that it seems only reasonable to expect these models and
theories to tell us something about the shapes of real trees. But therein lies a
problem of another order. A tree is a teleological form: it is a form with a
‘purpose’, an example of Darwinian designer-less design.
There are many challenges that a tree must meet. How can it pump water
from the roots to the leaves? How can it support its own tremendous weight?
How to maximize its light-gathering efficiency? How to grow tall enough to
compete for light with its neighbours, without becoming too massive for the
roots to bear? In the face of these dilemmas, there is little chance that a simple
model based in maths or physics will tell all about the shape of a tree. It is far
from clear, for example, that this shape is dictated by anything as simple as a
branching growth instability.
If you were to be asked to describe the shape of a planet or a grain of salt, you
can do so in a single word: ‘sphere’, or ‘cube’. But such geometric labels do not
work for trees. ‘Branched’ is clearly not enough; indeed there is no generic ‘tree
shape’ anyway, since this varies between species (Fig. 5.1 and Plate 8). To give a
precise description you would need to specify all of the branches and all of their
angles and lengths—to paint in words a picture of the complete tree (and then
only of that particular tree). You end up, in other words, like Sartre’s Antoine
Roquentin in La Nauseée, horribly fixated on the arboreal specifics in front of
you.
Fig. 5.1: The branching patterns of trees are a fingerprint of their species. (Photos:
a, Henry Brett; b, Kyle Flood; c, Amanda Slater; d, Andrew Storms).
 The most useful kind of mathematical description of a tree doesn’t do this.
Instead, it encapsulates a general shape in a set of rules—an algorithm—that
generates a whole family of characteristic yet non-unique forms. One might
devise a ‘cypress algorithm’, say, or an ‘oak algorithm’. An algorithmic
approach to generic form underlies much of the work on mathematical fractals:
the algorithm states how to ‘grow’ the form by enacting a series of steps. It is
important to remember that there’s no guarantee that the mathematical algorithm
bears any relation to the growth process that occurs in nature; but on the other
hand, it does seem clear that some natural forms are created by the repeated
implementation of certain simple steps.
Algorithmic models are capable of mimicking the essential shapes of trees
without paying the slightest regard to the biology or mechanics that underpins
them. These models are not descriptions of the real growth process, but rather
prescriptions for enabling us to generate something tree-like (or plant-like). Even
if that does not tell us much about the reasons why a tree looks the way it does, it
might provide clues to the primary characteristics of this form, so that we can
begin to make educated guesses about what a true model of growth should look
like.
 Leonardo da Vinci suspected (although without formulating it in quite these
terms) that there are algorithmic rules governing tree growth. For example, he
suggested that at branching points, the rule is that the central trunk is bent by
some specific angle when a side branch occurs on its own, but is not bent at all if
two side branches are positioned opposite one another. An artist could regard
these simply as rules of thumb for making his paintings look realistic; but as I
explained in Book II, for Leonardo representing nature was intimately bound up
with understanding it. He felt that the crucial aspect of a branching junction is
that the total cross-sectional area of the branches stays the same. As a hydraulic
engineer, he considered it important that these ‘pipes’—for the wood of a tree is
a mesh of cellular channels, the phloem and xylem, that carry water and sugar-
rich liquid to and from the extremities—retain their fluid-bearing capacity as
they branch.
Are Leonardo’s rules for branching angles true? Yes, to a degree (Fig. 5.2),
but they seem to depend on the size of the side branch: single small ones cause
next to no bending of the trunk. The German anatomist and embryologist
Wilhelm Roux, a pupil of Ernst Haeckel at Jena, attempted to specify these rules
more precisely at the end of the nineteenth century. He claimed that:
Fig. 5.2: Tree branches often tend to follow Leonardo’s rules that a single side-
branch deflects the main trunk (a) while two, on opposite sides of the trunk, do
not (b).
 1. When the central stem forks into two branches with equal width, they both
make the same angle with the original stem.
2. If one branch of the fork is of lesser width than the other, then the thinner
branch diverges at a larger angle than the thicker.
3. Side branches small enough that they do not deflect the main stem
appreciably diverge at angles between 70° and 90°.
Fig. 5.3: Rules for branching. One of the first sets of rules to formalize the way
natural branching occurs was drawn up in the nineteenth century by Wilhelm
Roux, who formulated them for the cardiovascular network (a). Hisao Honda
devised some rules for creating realistic-looking tree patterns in an algorithmic
way (b). The rules illustrated on the left apply to all branches except those that
diverge from the main trunk, which are governed by the rules on the right. Here
r1 and r2 are the ratios of the lengths of side-branches to that of the main branch
or trunk (L), and the angles a1 and a2 specify the respective divergence angles.
Successive branches off the main trunk diverge from one another by an angle α.

These rules are illustrated in Fig. 5.3a. Roux did not assert them for trees,
however: he was studying arterial networks, and it was only in the 1920s that the
biologist Cecil Murray suggested they applied to plant stems. Murray too was
more interested in blood flow, but researchers like him had started to suspect that
the similarity in form between trees and the blood circulatory system might be
no coincidence. Both are vascular networks: they are formed from hollow tubes
that carry fluids. Veins and arteries are like pipes of varying width, while wood
is like a bundle of narrow tubes that separates into bunches at branching points.
Murray’s algorithmic rules generate somewhat realistic-looking ‘trees’ when
they are used algorithmically to create a randomly branched network. A more
complex algorithm for making tree-like branching structures was proposed by
the Japanese biologist Hisao Honda in 1971, and runs as follows (see Fig. 5.3b):
1. Every branch forks into two ‘daughter’ branches at a single branching
point.
2. The two daughter branches are shorter than the ‘mother’ branch by
constant ratios r1 and r2.
3. The two daughter branches lie in the same plane as the mother branch (the
branch plane), and diverge from it at constant angles a1 and a2.
 4. The branch plane is always such that a line lying in this plane,
perpendicular to the mother branch, is horizontal. (This is the trickiest of
the rules to envisage, but is explained in the figure.)
5. An exception to (4) is made for branches diverging from the main trunk,
which observe the length ratios specified in (2) but branch off individually
at a constant angle a2, with a fixed divergence angle (here denoted α)
between consecutive branches.
With a few minor changes, this set of rules can be used to define algorithms that
produce a whole range of branching patterns closely mimicking those of real
trees (Fig. 5.4). Further modifications to account for the influences that real trees
experience (wind, gravity, the need to arrange leaves for optimal light
harvesting) give even more realism. Honda’s algorithm is deterministic: it
prescribes the branching pattern fully once the ratios and angles are fixed. Other
algorithms that have been used to generate life-like trees in computer art employ
random elements to create more irregular forms. In nature, randomness enters
into the branching patterns as a consequence of such things as breakages,
collisions between branches, growth stunting due to the shade of an overlying
canopy, and the mechanical influences of wind and rain. Another class of
deterministic algorithms, called L-systems by Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz of the
University of Regina in Canada, can be used to produce plant-and fern-like
structures (Fig. 5.5). Ultimately, one might hope that appropriate rules for these
tree-growing algorithms can be derived from models of how plants grow, such as
those mentioned in Book 1.
Fig. 5.4: Trees generated from Honda’s rules in Fig. 5.3b. (From Prusinkiewicz
and Lindenmayer, 1990.)
Figure 5.5: Plants and ferns generated by ‘deterministic’ branching algorithms,
where the pattern is completely specified by the rules (that is, it contains no
random elements). The same motifs recur again and again at different scales in
these structures, but regularity is evident to greater or lesser degrees. (From
Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer, 1990.)

SCALING UP

When Cecil Murray posited his rules of vascular network shape in the 1920s, he
went a crucial step further. Rather than merely describe these networks, he also
wanted to explain why they have the form they do. He proposed that they
embody a parsimonious minimization principle, entirely analogous to that which
we encountered in the previous chapter for river networks. The vascular
network, said Murray, has the form that requires the smallest amount of work to
pump the fluid around it. He argued that the energy required to drive blood down
branching arteries is smallest if narrow branches diverge at large angles and wide
ones diverge at shallow angles. It seems clear that Leonardo da Vinci had
something of this nature in mind when he formulated his own tree-branching
rules—he too was thinking about what kind of branching geometries were best
suited to efficient fluid flow through the system.
The analogies in form and function between rivers and biological branching
networks as fluid-distributing systems led the geologist Luna Leopold in the
1970s to consider whether his conclusions about the former might be generalized
to the latter. We observed in the previous chapter that Leopold suspected river
networks were shaped by a balance between distributing the power of water flow
evenly and ensuring that as little of this power is expended as possible. Might
plants and trees be governed by similar criteria, he wondered—and if so, what
are they? The equivalent of an even distribution of power, he suggested, was a
uniform spreading-out of a plant’s canopy so that it might best harness the
available sunlight. And instead of minimizing the power expenditure of the flow,
he thought that plants might seek to minimize the total length of the branches. It
was a reasonable thing to suppose, given that building new wood or stem costs
energy, although Leopold didn’t bother too much about the fact that branches of
the same length but different thickness contain very different amounts of tissue.
Wolfgang Schreiner of the Institute for Medical Computer Research in
Vienna, Austria, and his colleagues have shown that a wide variety of different
‘optimal’ branching patterns can be generated by growing them according to
rules that minimize different quantities. They have considered networks to which
new branches are added in succession, under the condition that each new branch,
starting at some specified point, makes the connection that minimizes some
quantity related to the width and length of all the existing channels. This sounds
a little abstract, perhaps, and indeed it is: the researchers were not trying to
specify what gets minimized, but simply to see what the patterns look like for
different choices of this criterion, whether it be total network length, energy
dissipation, or whatever. They found that different choices led to markedly
different structures, all of them looking more or less familiar (Fig. 5.6). Some
looked like meandering rivers on open plains, others like the streamlined
drainage networks seen in mountainous terrain, others like the veinous patterns
on leaves or the passageways of lungs. This does not tell us what controls the
structure of any of these particular networks, but it suggests that this
combination of algorithmic growth (repeatedly applying a set of rules) and
minimization (making the ‘best’ connections) could contain the seeds of an
explanation for a wide range of network structures.
Figure 5.6: Tree-like networks generated in a computer model that seeks to
minimize some ‘global’ property of the system, specifically the total value of
some aspect of all the branch segments. The network in a minimizes the total
segment length, that in b the total segment area, in c the total volume, and in d a
‘four-dimensional’ property, the so-called hypervolume. In each case, the result
is a branching pattern that looks familiar: a looks like a river on rather flat
terrain, for example, and c and d like rivers in increasingly mountainous terrain.
(From Schreiner et al., in Brown and West (eds), 2000.)

But perhaps the most striking and provocative application of ideas about
minimization to branching network shapes has come from a collaboration
between two ecologists, James Brown and Brian Enquist from the University of
New Mexico, and a physicist, Geoffrey West of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory. They have proposed that the branched and fractal nature of fluid
distribution systems in organisms can explain a long-standing biological puzzle
about how life’s processes depend on body mass.
 Small creatures have faster heartbeat tempos than big ones: babies’ hearts
beat faster than those of adults (they also breath faster), and the heartbeats of
small creatures such as birds are more rapid still. This relationship of beat rate to
mass can be expressed in precise mathematical terms, and it turns out to be a
power law, or scaling law (see page 38). For a wide variety of organisms, the
heartbeat rate turns out to be proportional to the inverse of the body mass raised
to the power 1/4. The life span of an organism, meanwhile, is directly
proportional to the body mass raised to the power 1/4—the bigger they are, the
longer they live. This means, incidentally, that the total number of heartbeats in
an organism’s lifetime (the heart beat rate multiplied by the life span) is a
constant for all organisms, equal to about one and a half billion. Mouse, human
or elephant: all have the same allotted time, when measured in heartbeats.
Anyone who knows how often children need feeding will also be familiar
with the idea that smaller organisms have a faster metabolism. An organism’s
metabolic rate—the rate at which it consumes energy—is proportional to the 3/4
power of body mass, which means that small creatures need more energy pound
for pound: the shrew must consume more than its entire body mass every day.
There are several other examples of these biological scaling laws: the cross-
sectional area of aortal arteries in mammals and of tree trunks also depend on
body mass raised to the power 3/4, for instance. They are all called allometric
scaling laws, and they are obeyed by organisms ranging from microbes to
whales.
Of course, one would expect large creatures to use up more energy than small
ones. But it is not at all obvious that the same scaling law should be followed
over such a huge range of body sizes. Still more puzzling are the actual values of
the powers in the scaling laws: they all seem to be multiples of 1/4. If the
biological parameters (heartbeat and so forth) were related to how quickly fluids
could be distributed in the body, you would expect the relationship to depend on
how far they have to travel, which would seem to be proportional to the body’s
dimensions. These in turn are proportional to the 1/3 power of body mass.∗ You
would therefore think that all these scaling laws should come with powers that
are multiples of 1/3, not 1/4. It seems almost to imply that bodies are four-
dimensional, not three-dimensional.
Enquist and colleagues suspected that the branched structure of the body’s
distribution networks might hold the key to understanding these allometric
scaling laws. They reasoned that ultimately organisms can survive only so long
as their tissues are supplied with the essential resources that sustain them. Air-
breathing creatures like us need a steady supply of oxygen to our cells. This is
delivered to the blood via the branching channels of our lungs, and distributed
around our bodies by our cardiovascular network. Trees and plants likewise need
a vascular system to provide water and nutrients. But branching itself is not
enough: the key point is that the branching is hierarchical, with big branches
splitting into smaller ones and those into channels smaller still. This tends to
produce fractal structures, which have the advantage that they exist ‘between
dimensions’: they extend throughout all of the space they occupy without filling
it entirely (which would leave no room for tissues themselves).
The researchers modelled these networks as systems of tubes which become
progressively thinner at each branching point. There are two governing
principles for the networks. First, all of them, regardless of size, have to end in
tubes of the same size. These terminal branches can be considered to be the
analogues of the smallest capillaries in cardiovascular systems, whose size is
geared to that of the organism’s individual cells—which varies little regardless
of the total body size. Second—and here is the crucial point—the network is
structured so that the amount of energy required to transport fluids through it is
minimized.
For plant vascular systems, the passages of the network are in fact bundles of
vessels of identical cross-section. At each branching point, the bundles split into
thinner bundles with fewer vessels in each. For this situation, the researchers
showed that the 3/4 scaling law of metabolic rate with body mass falls out quite
naturally from an analysis of the geometric properties of the energy-minimizing
network. For mammalian distribution networks, on the other hand, the situation
is rather more complex, and a 3/4 scaling law is obtained only when the model
includes the facts that the fluid flow is pulsed (due to the pumping of the heart)
and the tubes are elastic. Most importantly, these relationships apply only for
fractal distribution networks. Many human-made systems that distribute fluids or
energy for power generation, such as combustion engines or electric motors, do
not conduct this distribution through fractal networks, and they show power-law
scaling with exponents related to 1/3, not 1/4, as their mass increases.
This cannot be the whole answer to allometric scaling laws—for one thing,
they are obeyed by organisms that do not have branched distribution systems—
but it implies an intriguing significance for fractal networks in the living world.
James Brown suggests that it is in fact the ability of fractal networks to provide
an optimal supply system to bodies of different sizes that enables living
organisms to show such a huge range in body shapes and sizes, extending over
21 levels of magnification by ten from bacteria to whales. The theory also
demands some rethinking of how biology works. The emergence of the science
of genetics has encouraged the view that living systems from cells to ecosystems
are governed primarily by the transfer of information: genes control body shapes
and determine fitness, and populations grow and diversity owing to the shifting
make-up of their genetic resources. But the work of Enquist and colleagues
places the spotlight instead on energy: they say it is the need to distribute energy
efficiently, with minimal waste (dissipation), which determines the patterns of
the distribution network, with knock-on consequences for the size of creatures
and thus for their abundance, their activity and their longevity. The researchers
have argued that their theory can even explain biological properties at the level
of ecosystems, such as how the density of plants or animals that occupy a patch
of ground depends on the masses of the individual organisms. Such relationships
also tend to follow scaling laws with exponents that can be explained by
considering how much ‘metabolism’ can be sustained by the available energy.
Enquist, Brown, and West believe that their scaling laws, derived from the
branched networks of distribution systems, may provide a unified view of how
the living world works.

WEBS OF LIFE

With his preference for answers to pattern and form that invoke engineering
rather than ‘black-box’ Darwinism, D’Arcy Thompson would no doubt have
understood and appreciated all of this. Indeed, he discussed biological scaling
laws in the early pages of On Growth and Form, explaining for example how the
mechanics of a tree dictate that, if it is not to bend under its own weight, the
diameter of the trunk must increase in proportion to the height raised to the
power 3/2. ‘Among animals we see how small birds and beasts are quick and
agile, how slower and sedater movements come with larger size’, he wrote.
Yet there is, as we have seen, another strand to Thompson’s arguments that
demands to know not just why some things are possible and some not, but how
the pieces of the puzzle are put in place. In the same vein, so to speak, it is one
thing to say that a fractal branching network offers optimal distribution of fluids
and minimal energy dissipation; but the growing organism does not know that. It
is clearly not the case that every little passage of the lungs is specified by a
genetic blueprint, since no two lungs are alike, even in the same body, any more
than you can find a sycamore tree that can be exactly superimposed on another.
These networks have to be grown, and clearly that must happen via the now
familiar combination of chance and necessity: the generic form of the structure,
for example in terms of the fractal dimension and the average angles of
junctions, does not vary significantly from one case to the next, but the details
are always different. What are the rules that make this happen?
Consider, for example, the blood vessels of the cardiovascular system. One of
the best studied subsystems is the network of blood vessels in the human retina
(Fig. 5.7), which is a particularly dense-branching network, since the retina has
the highest oxygen requirement of any tissue in the human body. The
ophthalmologist Barry Masters at the University of Bern in Switzerland has
collaborated with physicist Fereydoon Family in Atlanta, Georgia, to calculate
the fractal dimension of this network, and they find that it has a value of around
1.7: the same as is seen in clusters of particles grown by diffusion-limited
aggregation, and in cracks and electrical discharges formed in the dielectric
breakdown model. These, we saw earlier, are examples of processes governed by
so-called Laplacian growth, where positive feedbacks amplify small, random
bumps at the growth front and turn them into new branches.
Figure 5.7: The blood vessels around the retina form a fractal branching network
with a fractal dimension of about 1.7. (Photo: Barry Masters, University of Bern,
kindly provided by Fereydoon Family, Emory University.)

Does this mean that the growth of the retinal vascular network is similarly
governed by Laplacian growth instabilities? That is possible, but it doesn’t
necessarily follow. For one thing, we have seen that the fractal dimension is
rather a broad-brush characteristic of a branching structure: there is no reason to
believe that only a single mechanism can give rise to a network with a fractal
dimension of 1.7. And in any event, the retinal vasculature doesn’t look much
like a DLA cluster: it is far less bumpy and convoluted. Moreover, the process by
which growing blood vessels proliferate and develop branches, called
angiogenesis, is complicated and doesn’t always generate a diverging, randomly
branched structure—often the vessels are interconnected in more complex ways.
For example, blood vessels may sometimes intersect and join to form closed
loops: they do not necessarily exhibit the self-avoidance we saw in river
networks (and which is generally a property of DLA too). This is particularly
evident in the vein networks of leaves and plants (Fig. 5.8), which grow via
processes similar to angiogenesis. The reconnection between two branches in a
vascular system is called anastomosis, and it means that there is more than one
possible route for getting from one point to another in the network. So these
vascular systems are more like the Paris metro than like a tree: if you want to go
from A to B, you often have a choice of several possible paths.
Figure 5.8: The branching patterns of plant vascular systems: ivy leaves (a), a sea
fan (b) and a part of the vein network in a leaf of the African shrub griffonia (c).
(Photos: a, Lars Hammar; b, Gary Rinald; c, Peter Shanks.)
 The first stage in the formation of a vascular network is the appearance of a
web of vessels made from cells called angioblasts. This appears to happen by
chemotaxis: the cells emit some chemical substance that diffuses into the
surroundings and attracts others to move towards them, homing in on the densest
concentration of the attractant. As we’ve seen chemotaxis enables bacteria to
talk to one another and coordinate their movements, forming complex patterns
and flows. Angioblasts emit a protein chemo-attractant called vascular
endothelial growth factor, the influence of which causes them to gather into
chainlike bunches that intersect in a web and eventually become veins.
The fractal, branched shape of this web emerges in the next step, which is
angiogenesis. The tissues that the vascular network supplies with vital fluids get
steadily bigger as the organism grows: the channels are transport networks in an
expanding landscape. If any part of the landscape becomes too distant from one
of these supply routes, it risks becoming depleted in life-sustaining ingredients
(oxygen or nutrients, say), and a new route is needed. But growing a new vein,
like building a new road, has a cost in energy and materials, and it cannot be
done lightly. How are cells at risk identified, and how do they stimulate the
formation of a vein? The form of the vascular network must ultimately derive
from the answers to these questions.
 Angiogenesis also depends on diffusing chemical signals. Tissue cells far
from existing blood vessels begin to produce and emit proteins called angiogenic
factors: such cells are said to be ischemic. When the chemical messengers reach
a nearby vessel, it sprouts a new limb which grows in the direction in which the
concentration of the chemical signal increases, that is, towards its source. In
effect the distressed cells are saying ‘throw me a line’. An analogous process
produces the characteristic vein patterns of leaves (Fig. 5.8), where it seems that
the chemical signal is supplied by the plant hormone auxin. I showed in Book I
how auxin controls the appearance of new leaves or florets at the tip of a
growing plant stem, giving rise to the remarkable mathematical regularities in
the arrangements of these features on the plant in the process called phyllotaxis.
In a nice echo of the fractal nature of many plants, it seems that the same
substance dominates the formation of the branching pattern at the smaller scale
of individual leaves.
The distribution of auxin throughout a leaf is often spotty: there are isolated
sites that are rich in auxin, surrounded by regions where the concentration is
lower. New veins will tend to grow towards these auxin spots, which the plant
interprets as a plea for more nutrients. It is tempting to imagine that the auxin
spots correspond to locations where auxin is being produced at a higher rate—in
which case the shape of the network will be dictated by the underlying pattern of
auxin spots. But it seems that this spotty pattern might instead be self-organized
out of a tendency for the leaf cells to produce auxin at a constant rate
everywhere.
Pavel Dimitrov and Steven Zucker at Yale University have shown how this
may come about. They have represented a portion of leaf as a collection of cells
that all produce and release a signalling hormone, denoted S. Each cell can
‘detect’ the concentration of S inside itself and in its neighbours. If an adjacent
cell holds much less S, the original cell may alter its surface membrane so as to
let out more S to that neighbour. Cells that increase their permeability this way
are on the road to becoming vein cells, which conduct S more freely than
ordinary cells. The formation of a nascent vein thus channels the hormone away
from hotspots towards regions of low concentration. Since existing veins carry
the hormone away efficiently, those low-concentration regions are typically such
veins themselves—and so a channel grows between a hotspot and the nearest
vein. The more distant a patch of leaf is from its nearest veins, the more S is
likely to accumulate and the stronger is the signal promoting the formation of a
new vein leading to that site. This process is a little like the way river networks
form: rain falls equally everywhere, but the water runs down the steepest
gradient until it reaches a river, gradually carving out a new tributary.
This model generates the kind of vein growth patterns seen in real leaves; in
particular, new veins tend to join existing ones at right angles. Veins may appear
as ‘stand-alone’ branches, or they may form junctions and loops. As the network
evolves on a growing grid of cells, the hotspots of S move around: old ones are
‘relieved’, while new areas become starved of access channels. The auxin spots
of a growing leaf are similarly ephemeral, suggesting that there is not after all
some underlying blueprint for where the branches should go. The pattern draws
itself, each stage setting the scene for the next.
This is comparable to the way a combination of diffusion and reaction of
chemical substances within a uniform matrix can give rise to spontaneous
pattern formation: the process I described in Book I, where I showed that it can
account for patterns like the spots, stripes, and networks seen on animal skins.
Hans Meinhardt, a German biologist who has pioneered the understanding of
these so-called chemical reaction–diffusion systems and of how they might
produce biological patterns, was one of the first to suggest that venation
networks might be explained this way. Meinhardt proposed a model that
involved two diffusing chemical signals. In this scheme, the signals stimulate
branches to grow and divide, while branch tips have a tendency to avoid each
other. But growing tips are less strongly repelled by filaments that exist already,
and so while tips will not meet end to end, a single tip might intersect and
reconnect with an older branch—this is the process of anastomasis that I
mentioned above. Thus, Meinhardt’s reaction–diffusion model can also generate
realistic-looking vascular networks; but it is hypothetical and suffers from the
fact that it must postulate two chemical triggers, whereas in plants only auxin
has so far been identified as one such.
Steffen Bohn and his colleagues in Paris have recognized a similarity between
vascular webs and crack networks in thin layers of brittle material (see page 95).
In both cases, for example, branch intersections at right angles are common.
They have proposed that, by analogy with cracking, vein networks might be
controlled by mechanical forces rather than chemical signals. They point out that
leaves contain both soft and stiff layers of tissue, which creates stresses, and they
speculate that the directions of vein growth and the angles at which they branch
and intersect might be determined by the way veins push and pull on one
another.
If nothing else, this illustrates that there is more than one possible way to
grow a tree. What seems clear, however, is that nature has found a way of
employing some simple principles that achieve a delicate balance of chance and
determinism to generate distribution networks beautifully adapted to their role of
transporting fluids.
 6
WEB WORLDS

Why We’re All in This Together

In the summer of 2003 the lights went out in New York City. In fact, they went
out all over the east side of North America, from Detroit to parts of Canada,
affecting one-third of Canada’s population and one in seven people in the United
States. But there is something about a stricken Manhattan that always plays to
the public imagination, and here was the city in unaccustomed darkness, its
offices abandoned, its streets benighted, its stock exchange frozen. A state of
emergency was declared.
Inevitably, perhaps, many New Yorkers feared at first that this was a terrorist
act. But it wasn’t. The outage was due to a breakdown of the power grid itself,
on a scale rarely witnessed before.
But surely this grid, so vital to the economy, the security and the safety of the
country’s citizens (imagine if this had happened in the depths of a New York
winter), is designed to avoid such catastrophic failure? After all, it is a complex,
interconnected web that offers many different routes from one part to another. As
in a city road network, if one way is blocked then there is always another. What
event could be so damaging and pervasive as to undermine this wealth of
alternatives? Culpability was attributed and denied all over the affected territory.
The Canadian Department of National Defense blamed a lightning strike in the
Niagara region. The Canadian prime minister’s office said the cause was a fire at
a power plant in New York. The Canadian Defense Minister pinned it to an
alleged breakdown at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The governor of
New York State would have none of this, instead placing the blame on the
Canadian side of the border.
In early 2004 the final report of a joint US-Canadian task force assigned the
job of investigating the largest power failure in American history came up with
the following explanation: the power company FirstEnergy had not been diligent
enough in trimming trees in part of its Ohio service area. The report said that at
1.30 in the morning on 14 August a generating plant in Eastlake, Ohio, stopped
transmitting power because a computer error left it unable to cope with the high
electrical demand. This put a strain on nearby high-voltage power lines, and they
were tipped over the edge into failure when they came in contact with overgrown
trees.
Overgrown trees? Does the north-eastern seaboard of North America stand
vulnerable to some tall trees in the woods of Ohio? Was it this that led to the
shut-down of 256 power plants by a quarter past four that morning? You might
reasonably ask, what kind of idiot designed this system?
The answer is that no one, idiotic or otherwise, designed this system. How
could they? A power grid of this magnitude is not built like an office block,
according to the blueprint of an architect. It is a growing thing, continually
expanding and mutating in response to changes in electricity demand, in
demographics, in technology, and the need for repair and renewal. This is not a
product of human planning but is, like cities themselves, more akin to an
organism, sustained by the complicated interconnections between its component
parts.
Civilization generates many complex networks of this sort, which evolve over
time according to no master plan. Road networks and urban streets are like this,
and so are the webs of trade and travel that link global air and sea ports. The
telephone network was one of the first technological artefacts to be considered as
a complex network, but it is the emergence of the Internet that has truly placed a
spotlight on the interconnectedness of communications. Beyond this, however,
there are human networks that are less tangible but arguably even more vital to
the ebb and flow of society: our webs of friends and associates, the networks of
business and commerce, the virtual conduits along which ideas, money, rumour,
culture, and disease are conveyed.
Since none of these systems enjoys much by way of the debatable benefits of
rational design, it is quite proper that they be regarded as aspects of what was
once called natural philosophy. We do not know what governs their growth, nor
what structures result. We must explore them as we would aspects of the natural
world. And indeed, it is now becoming clear that they share many characteristics
with networks that exist in nature, such as food webs or the communication
between genes and proteins in our cells. It is rather remarkable, then, that until
the past decade or so scientists have had so little to say about complex networks,
their patterns of links and the qualities that these engender. The 2003 North
American power failure provides just one among very many reasons why it is a
matter of some urgency to understand them, to decode their laws of growth and
to map out their structures.

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE

Until recently, the only archetypal network one tended to see in human society
was that of a tree: the family tree. Today, mapping one’s family tree has become
a hobby, if not sometimes an obsession, for thousands of people. It is a habit
acquired from the nobility, who were traditionally much exercised about the
quality of their bloodlines, and also from theologians, who made great play of
biblical genealogies, sometimes depicted in medieval art with a very literal
allusion to the arboreal analogy (the Tree of Jesse, showing Christ’s ancestry, is a
favourite theme for stained-glass church windows). There is an obvious
conceptual link here with the tree symbolism favoured by early Darwinists, its
branches an elaboration of the classical Great Chain of Being.
Now, the striking thing about this network topos is that it implies direction
and insists on a uniqueness of path: there is only one way to get from the tree
trunk to any particular branch tip. To row upstream in a river to the headwaters
of any specific tributary, you must select the correct branch every time the
channel divides. In genealogical trees, loops are rare—although much less so for
the inter-marrying nobility than for typical members of society today (unless
they live in a small, self-contained community).
But to understand the structure of our social worlds, a tree is not the right
kind of metaphor. If we think instead about our network of friends, we will see
straight away that loops are the norm. I know Joe and I know Mary, but of
course Joe and Mary know each other, because we all work in the same office. I
met my friend Wendy at a party of my friend Dave’s, because they are old school
pals. So if we map out these friendship networks by drawing links between
friends, we find it interconnected in many ways. We might imagine that the more
appropriate image, then, is a net or a spider’s web. In this network, there are
many different ways to get from one intersection (or node) to another.
Mathematicians call this kind of network a graph, and they study its
properties using graph theory. The beginnings of this branch of maths can be
traced to the great eighteenth-century Swiss geometer Leonhard Euler, who
studied a problem posed by the bridges of the East Prussian city of Königsberg
(now Kaliningrad in Russia). There are seven of these bridges across the Pregel
river, five of them giving access to an island where the river divides. Can one
stroll around the city along a route that takes you over each bridge only once? In
1735 Euler proved that this was impossible. He did so by converting the layout
of Königsberg into a graph in which each node represented one of the land areas
and the links between them represented the bridges. This was, in effect, the first
theorem of graph theory.
Graphs are a form of map, but they generally take no heed of geography, of
the spatial distance between points. Instead, they are concerned with the pattern
of connectivity, or what is often called the topology of the network. Metro maps
are somewhat like this: although the spatial positions of the stations on the map
are more or less related to their geographical locations, the distances between
stations on the map typically have little relation to those in the real world. If you
lived your entire life riding the metro, then you wouldn’t care about any
approximate geographical realism, such as whether a station lay to the north or
the east—all that would matter is the connectivity, or how to get from one station
to another. And when a graph does not reflect a spatial structure—for example, if
it depicts a friendship network—then the actual positions of each node on the
diagram have no significance at all; everything of importance is in the topology.
So what might a real friendship network look like? Sociologists and
anthropologists have had a long-standing interest in that question. One of the
first attempts to give it a thorough mathematical treatment came in the 1950s,
when the mathematician Anatol Rapaport at the University of Chicago was
seeking to understand how infectious diseases propagate through a population. If
the disease is passed on through personal contact, then clearly its rate of
transmission depends on how often infected people encounter others who are not
infected (or immune). An outbreak in an isolated community might devastate
that community but have little impact on the world beyond. By contrast, in a big
city where individuals come across many strangers every day, we might expect
that the disease would quickly reach epidemic proportions. So there is
presumably some critical level of average connectivity, in terms of the number of
strangers encountered in a day, above which the outbreak switches from being
contained and localized to uncontained and pervasive. At what point does this
happen?
Rapaport didn’t know what a typical ‘encounter network’ looked like for any
society. But he guessed that it would be reasonable to assume this was pretty
random: you have an equal chance of bumping into everyone in the population.
Moreover, it seemed sensible to imagine that there was a well-defined average
number of such encounters—that is, an average connectivity, denoted K. You
might, for example, get close enough to 30 other people each day, en route to
work or in the shops say, to infect them. Obviously randomness is not the whole
story, because there is a much bigger probability that we will encounter (and in
this setting, infect) our immediate family members and work colleagues than we
will Joe Random. But the assumption of randomness seems a good place to start.
The social network on which the disease spreads, then, is represented here by
a series of nodes (people) connected at random to an average of K other nodes
(Fig. 6.1a). Rapaport and his colleagues were able to show that in this case the
fraction of the total population that becomes infected increases exponentially as
the average degree of connectivity K increases: the more connections to each
node, the greater the spread of disease. That is what you would expect, of course,
but Rapaport put that expectation into precise mathematical terms.
Fig. 6.1: Social networks can be drawn as vertices or nodes (circles), representing
individuals, linked by lines that could, for example, represent ties of friendship,
or ‘infectious’ close contacts made during a day, or sexual contacts. There is a
distribution of degrees of connectivity k—some individuals are highly
connected, others have few connections (a). In a random network or random
graph, where links between individuals are forged at random, the distribution of
k values has a particular mathematical form, with a well-defined average value.
Such networks are disorderly, in contrast to regular grids (b), where all vertices
have precisely the same degree of connectivity (in this square grid, the
connectivity k is 4).

At the end of the 1950s, the random graphs that Rapaport introduced were
studied more rigorously by the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös and his
collaborator Alfred Rényi. They wanted to understand what general properties
these graphs have. That is not an easy thing to assess, because by definition there
is an immense number of different random graphs that connect any given set of
nodes: each graph is constructed by forging links at random between any two
nodes, no matter how close or far apart they are. You can ‘grow’ such a graph by
following an algorithm, repeating it again and again:
1. Choose a node at random.
2. Choose another node at random.
3. Draw a link between them.
This procedure does not guarantee that all nodes will have the same number of
links; in general, they will not. But each graph has an average number of links
per node (K) which increases steadily as you keep iterating the steps above. One
of the questions Erdös and Rényi asked was: how well-connected is the graph as
K increases? If there are only a few links between many nodes, then some nodes
will remain isolated, while others will be connected only into little patches. If
there are many more links than nodes—if K is large—then you may have a good
chance of finding a route between any two nodes in the network. How does this
‘connectedness’ of the entire array of nodes alter as K is increased? You might
expect it to increase steadily, but Erdös and Reényi calculated that in fact there is
an abrupt change at a certain critical value of K equal to 1. This can be seen by
looking for the largest interconnected set of nodes in the system. If each node
has, on average, less than one connection, this largest interconnected fraction
stays small—negligible in comparison to the size of the entire array. But once K
exceeds 1, the largest interconnected component grows in size very rapidly,
quickly approaching the size of the entire network.
This is critical for problems of epidemiology such as those Rapaport studied.
It tells us that, for random networks, the spread of disease can be explosive once
the connectivity exceeds a certain threshold, because at that point just about
everyone becomes connected to everyone else.
There is another important property of a random graph, which is related to
how quick it is to navigate. Suppose you want to go from any one node to any
other. If the degree of connectivity is well above the critical threshold, so that
essentially all of the nodes are interconnected, there are in general many
alternative routes you can take. Measured in terms of the number of links
traversed, some of these can be very long. But some are rather short, because the
principle of random interconnection forges many shortcuts between nodes that
are ‘distant’ in visual terms. (Recall that in general these visual distances do not
have any physical meaning, they’re just a way of representing the nodes on a
two-dimensional plot. So the ‘length’ of each link has no meaning either—that is
why we can think about path lengths merely in terms of the number of links they
incorporate. It is perhaps better to say that the ‘shortcuts’ ensure that every part
of the array of nodes is likely to be accessible from every other part by a few
hops, rather than by a succession of many links.)
Just as we can define an average connectivity K for a random graph, so we
can define an average path length L: this is the average number of links you
must cross to get from one node to another. For a random graph, this length can
be surprisingly small even for a big network. We have a familiar expression for
this: ‘it’s a small world’.
It is familiar because that is what experience tells us. You meet someone at a
party whom you have never seen before, but it turns out that she went to school
with your brother-in-law. In my experience, the older you get, the more this
seems to happen. If social networks are random networks, however, it is no
surprise. The small-world effect suggests that the random network is a much
better description of social networks than a regular grid is, in which nodes are
connected only to their immediate neighbours (Fig. 6.1b). In that case there are
no shortcuts: to get from one node to a ‘distant’ one, you have no option but to
pass along all of the links in between.
But there is one problem: social networks are not random.
This is obvious the moment you stop to think about it, for the reason I alluded
to above. What the random-network model says is that two of your good friends
have no greater chance of knowing each other than they have of knowing anyone
else in the population. But this clearly isn’t so. I met Wendy at Dave’s party,
because Wendy and Dave are old friends. We meet our friends’ friends, and they
become our friends too. Or perhaps we all met in a group, at work, or at college,
or at the sports club. To put it technically, if there are links in a social network
from A to B and A to C, then there is a much higher chance of a link between B
and C than between either of these and some other, random node. Friends tend to
form clusters with a strong degree of interconnectivity, while these clusters are
linked to other clusters via a lower density of links (Fig. 6.2). The same is true of
other social networks: businesses tend to show clustering in their dealings with
other companies, as do the collaborations between scientists or musicians.
Fig. 6.2: Real social networks tend to be clustered: groups of friends know one
another, linking them in a dense web, while there is a lower density of links to
other groups.
 Clustering seems to work in opposition to the small-world effect of short path
length. In effect, clustering implies that there is a higher chance of a node
forming a link to another in its vicinity than to one far off: there is a bias against
making shortcuts. Indeed, clustering is precisely what one would expect from
grid-like graphs, where all links are ‘local’, joining near neighbours. How can a
social network simultaneously show the high clustering characteristic of a grid
and the short average path length characteristic of a random network?
The physicists Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, working at Cornell
University in the late 1990s, showed how that can happen. They came up with a
model that allowed them to convert a network gradually from a grid-like
structure to a random structure. It was called random rewiring, and it was a
surprisingly simple idea. You started with a grid, and‘rewired’ the nodes one at a
time. At each step, a node was selected at random and one of its links was
redirected from a near neighbour to a randomly chosen node, which could be
near or far. Watts and Strogatz began with a circular grid of nodes, since that has
no edges (where the connectivity of the nodes is different from that in the
interior). The circular grid on the left of Fig. 6.3a may not look like a typical
grid, but it is: each node is connected just to its two neighbours and its two next
nearest. As the random rewiring proceeds, the regular structure disappears into a
tangled jumble of links.
As this happens, both the amount of clustering and the average path length
decrease, as expected: these are both large for a regular grid, and small for a
random network. But the crucial point is that they don’t decrease at the same
rate. The path length drops abruptly after only a few rewirings: a handful of
shortcuts is enough to bring most of the nodes ‘close’ to most of the others. But
the clustering changes rather little until more rewiring has been effected. So
there is a family of networks, for rewiring degrees between these two limits,
which have small L but high clustering (Fig. 6.3b). These have properties that
seem to resemble our social ‘small worlds’, and Watts and Strogatz called them
small-world networks.
Fig. 6.3: The rewiring networks of Strogatz and Watts are steadily changed from
regular grids to random networks by breaking and remaking links at random (a).
For a certain range of rewiring between these extremes (0 = regular grid, 1 =
fully random network), the networks are ‘small worlds’, with short average path
lengths L between any two points, but significant degrees of clustering C (b).

Are social networks really like this? It is very difficult to gather data on
people’s friendship networks—I’ll come back to this shortly—but Watts and
Strogatz took a different approach to the question. They looked at the network
that links film actors according to whether they have appeared together in a film.
Each node of this grid is an actor, and there is a direct link between them if they
have been co-stars. The virtue of this network is that it is precisely defined—
either two actors were in the same film or they were not. Furthermore, the
network is already known, thanks to a game invented in the early 1990s by a
group of American college students. These film buffs had come to the
conclusion that the actor Kevin Bacon was the centre of the film universe. It was
not that Bacon was a particularly wonderful actor (though he is fine), nor that he
is a particularly big star; but in the movies of that period he seemed to crop up
everywhere. He had worked with countless better-known stars. (It helped that his
early successes included the ensemble pieces Animal House and Diner.) In the
Kevin Bacon Game, the aim was to link any named actor to Kevin Bacon in as
few steps as possible. Elvis Presley? He appeared in Harum Scarum (1965) with
Suzanne Covington, who appeared with Bacon in Beauty Shop (2005). So you
can reach Bacon from Elvis in two hops: Elvis has a Bacon Number of 2.
All this can be deduced from the Internet Movie Database, which lists just
about all the commercial films made since 1898 (about 200,000 of them). But
Watts and Strogatz did not have to comb through it, because the film-star
network had already been mapped out by computer scientists Brett Tjaden and
Glenn Wasson at the University of Virginia, who had decided to automate the
Kevin Bacon Game. At the Oracle of Bacon,* you can find the Bacon Number of
any actor in an instant, along with the shortest path linking that actor to Bacon.
(That’s where I got the Elvis link—I’m afraid I’d never heard of Suzanne
Covington.) Tjaden was more than happy to give Watts and Strogatz access to
his database.
The researchers hoped that the film actor network would serve as a surrogate
for other social networks. Clearly, making a film together is not the same as
striking up a friendship (it can notoriously mean quite the opposite), but it
seemed reasonable to assume that the two might share some features. And if
nothing else, the film-actor net might be a good model of professional contact
webs. In any event, Watts and Strogatz established that the film network has
precisely the characteristic they identified for a small-world network: it has an
average path length comparable to that of a random network containing the same
number of nodes and links, but much higher clustering.
In fact, the average path length was 3.65, which means that on average any
actor can be connected to any other in between three and four hops. Given that
the database spans a century and many different countries, that seems
remarkable. But what of Kevin Bacon? The average Bacon Number currently
stands at about 2.9, which implies that Kevin Bacon is indeed better connected
than an average actor—it takes less than three jumps, on average, to reach him.
Yet there is nothing so special about that: there are many actors with comparably
small average path lengths, and over a thousand are better connected than Bacon.
The best is currently Rod Steiger: the average Steiger Number is 2.68. As
Duncan Watts has pointed out, in a small world network just about everyone
seems to be the centre.
The Kevin Bacon Game echoes a familiar trope popularized by John Guare’s
1990 play Six Degrees of Separation, in which a character claims that ‘Everyone
on this planet is separated by only six other people.’ Where did Guare get that
idea from? Why six? In 1967 the Harvard social scientist Stanley Milgram
devised an ingenious experiment to measure how well-connected social
networks are. He sent 196 letters to randomly selected people in Omaha,
Nebraska,** asking them to forward it to a stockbroker from Sharon,
Massachusetts who worked in Boston. All Milgram provided was the man’s
name, along with a curious request: rather than trying to track the stockbroker
down, the recipients were to send the letter to someone else they knew
personally, who they felt might be better placed to know the man. (Perhaps they
might have relatives in Boston, or were stockbrokers themselves, say.) All
recipients were asked to do the same, until the letter reached its destination. And
surprisingly, some of them did. Even more surprising, however, was the number
of journeys those letters took to get there. On average, just six were required:
just five intermediaries between the start of the chain in Omaha and the
Bostonian stockbroker. A small world indeed.
There are many other indications that our social and professional networks
share this property of short average path length. Mathematicians have long
enjoyed their own version of the Kevin Bacon Game in which they look for the
shortest path that links them with Paul Erdös, the founder of random-graph
theory. It is not this distinction that led to Erdös being singled out, however, but
the great number of collaborators he worked with on his many papers (he
published over 1,500 of them). The average Erdös Number in the network of
mathematicians and scientists that can be linked to him this way is about 4.7.*
Mark Newman, working at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, has
established that the average path length in the collaboration network of the
44,000 scientists who have placed preprints of their papers on the archive set up
by physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory is 5.9: again, six degrees of
separation. ‘This small-world effect is probably a good sign for science’,
Newman concludes. ‘It shows that scientific information—discoveries,
experimental results, theories—will not have far to travel through the network of
scientific acquaintance to reach the ears of those who can benefit by them.’
The same small-world property is found in other collaborations. The
physicists Pablo Gleiser and Leon Danon in Barcelona have looked at the
network formed by over a thousand jazz musicians listed in the Red Hot Jazz
Archive who played in bands between 1912 and 1940, and find that it has an
average path length of just 2.79.
But Watts and Strogatz also looked at the properties of two networks that
have nothing to do with social systems: the electrical power grid of the western
United States, and the links between neural cells in the nematode worm
Caenorhabditis elegans. The latter is one of the best studied multicellular
organisms, since it has a relatively small number of cells: precisely 959 in the
female and 1,031 in the male. Of these, 302 form a primitive nervous system, in
which the pattern of connectivity is known exactly. Watts and Strogatz found
that both these networks have the small-world feature of an average path length
close to that of the corresponding random network, coupled to a considerably
higher degree of clustering.

THE RICH GET RICHER

But what do these networks actually look like? Watts and Strogatz’s random
rewiring model generated specific examples of small-world networks, but these
were rather artificial, being pinned to a ring of nodes in which each node was
constrained (by the way the model was set up) to have precisely three links.
Clearly, social networks are not like that. But Watts and Strogatz assumed that
they are not so different: they imagined that even if we don’t all have precisely
the same number of friends, this number probably doesn’t differ very much. In
other words, there will be a certain average number of friends per person, and
progressively fewer people will have progressively less or more links than that.
But, Watts confesses with some chagrin, they didn’t check that this was really
how things are. It turns out that many of the small-world networks in the real
world do not look like this at all.
The first intimation of that came in 1999, when Albert-László Barabási and
his colleagues Réka Albert and Hawoong Jeong at the University of Notre Dame
in Indiana investigated the connectivity statistics for over 300,000 web pages on
the domain of their university. Each web page is connected to others by
hyperlinks, where a click on the mouse will take you to the other page. The
researchers found that this segment of the World Wide Web (WWW) is a small
world: they estimated that, if it is representative of the Web as a whole, then any
web page is connected to any other by an average of just 19 links—even though
the WWW at that time held over a billion documents. And because of this small-
world structure, that average path length will not increase much even at the rapid
pace with which the WWW is growing. Even if the number of pages expands
tenfold, the average distance between pages would grow by just two links. This
slow growth in average path length as a network expands is one of the
characteristics of a small-world network, and is the result of the large number of
shortcuts that very quickly weave new nodes into the web.
But the pattern of links was quite different from what Watts and Strogatz had
implicitly assumed. Most pages had only a single link, though some had
hundreds, and a very few had several thousand.* Now, you might intuitively
expect there to be many more pages with rather few connections than with
many; but the connectivity statistics that Barabási and colleagues found are
different from what you might expect if the connections were being made
independently and at random. In fact, they have a very particular mathematical
form: the number of pages having k connections is proportional to the inverse of
k raised to some power. This is, in other words, yet another example of a power
law. We saw inChapter 2 that systems whose structure is described by power
laws have the general property that they are scale-free—there is no characteristic
size to them. What this means here is that there is no ‘typical’ number of links to
a node of the network.
These connectivity statistics tell us what the probability is of a node picked at
random having a particular number of connections k. Although this chance gets
smaller as k gets bigger, it does so considerably less quickly than it would either
for the kind of networks obtained from random rewiring or for random graphs.
In other words, the WWW has a disproportionate number of very highly
connected pages. This means that, when the network is plotted out on a page,
parts of it seem to be ‘pinched’ where a large number of links converge on these
highly connected nodes (Fig. 6.4a). In contrast, a random graph looks relatively
uniform throughout (Fig. 6.4b). The physical structure of the Internet (by which
I mean the actual links between computers, not the virtual net that connects web
pages) also has this shape (Fig. 6.4c).* It means that not all of the nodes are
equal—some enjoy much better connections than others. There are many
nonentities, but a few celebrities.
Fig. 6.4: Scale-free networks look ‘pinched’ at a few highly connected vertices (a),
whereas random graphs are rather uniform (b). This pinched quality is evident in
the structure of a part of the Internet (c ; see
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/topology.html). (Images: a was prepared
using NetLogo software, available at http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/; b:
courtesy of Paros Oikonomou and Philippe Cluzel, University of Chicago.)
 It now seems that many diverse networks have this same topological
structure, with power-law distributions of connectivity. The pattern is found, for
example, in email communications (where a link is established between two
nodes if an email is sent between them), in the web of direct flights between
airports, in the network of trade links between countries—and in the network
linking movie actors. Outside the human social sphere, Barabási and his
coworkers have found scale-free networks in the biochemical pathways of living
cells. For example, they looked at how all the molecules involved in the
metabolic chemical reactions of Escherichia coli bacteria, and the protein
enzymes in brewer’s yeast, interact with one another, with a link existing
between them if they participate together in a particular chemical process. In
both cases the network was scale-free (Fig. 6.5).
Where does this topological structure come from? Graph theory has
traditionally considered the different ways that a bunch of nodes may be wired
together; in the random graphs of Erdös and Rényi, links are made between two
randomly selected nodes. But Barabási and Albert realized that many real
networks grow almost like plants branching from a seedling: they approached
the origin of scale-free networks as a problem of growth and form. The World
Wide Web is growing every day as new web sites are created and new pages
added. Whenever a new node is plugged into the network, the question is, to
which others should it connect? A rule that the link is always made to the nearest
node, for example, would tend to generate a grid. A rule that the selection is
made at random will produce a random graph. But Barabási and Albert said that
scale-free networks grow according to another rule: the new node connects to an
existing node at random, but with a bias: the more links a node already has, the
more likely it is to be chosen. A node with two links is twice as likely to be
selected as a node with one.
Figure 6.5 A part of the network formed from molecules involved in yeast
metabolism. Each vertex is a molecule, and the links denote enzymatic reactions
that convert one molecule to another. (Image: Hawoong Jeong, Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology.)

This means that the more connections a node already has, the more likely it is
to acquire more as the network grows. But that doesn’t mean that all the best-
connected nodes are guaranteed to be awarded all the new links, because there is
an element of chance in the choice. If there are lots of nodes, then even an
extremely well-endowed one will have only a relatively small chance of being
selected compared with the chance that a new link will go instead to any one of
the others. That is why the most well-connected nodes in a scale-free network
are also the most rare. All the same, the implication of this rule of ‘preferential
attachment’ is plain to see: in terms of connectivity of nodes, the rich get richer.
The connection rule guarantees a persistent inequality of connectedness—and
Barabási and Albert showed that the nature of this inequality is described by
power-law statistics.
In retrospect, this is no surprise. The ‘rich get richer’ principle is precisely
what seems to happen in capitalist societies: wealth attracts yet more wealth. If
that is so, we should expect it to lead to a power-law distribution of wealth, in
which a very few individuals are obscenely rich. In 1897 the Italian economist
and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto showed that this is the case in many societies: at
least for the rich end of the income distribution, the figures follow a power law,
which economists now call the Pareto law. The American sociologist Robert
Merton has dubbed this the Matthew Principle, since the Gospel of Matthew
provides one of the first known descriptions of this particular injustice: ‘For unto
every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have in abundance; but from him
that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’
Why, though, should networks grow according to this principle? There isn’t
really a general argument that works for every scale-free net from metabolic
pathways to film actors, but in social networks it often boils down to the issue of
fame. The better-known you are, the more likely your fame will be boosted even
more. Think about the World Wide Web: you have made a new web page and
want to provide a link to some standard reference source for a particular aspect
of what it describes. The chances are that you will choose the link that you can
see others have chosen for the same purpose. Of course, these days you’re likely
to find that link by a Google search, but that makes the bias even more strongly
deterministic, because the Google page ranking scheme depends on how many
links a page has.* And so pages acquire links not because someone has reviewed
all the alternatives and decided that it is the best reference source, but because it
is already ‘famous’. The same is true for citations in the scientific literature,
which also have power-law ranking statistics: people cite a book or a paper
because that is what others have done, and not because they have read it
themselves.
This doesn’t mean that a node’s connectedness in a network like this bears no
relation to any genuine merit. It may be that a web page or a citation begins to
attract more links than others because it really is good. But as long as the law of
preferential attachment operates, the connectedness of different nodes probably
does not reflect their real differences in merit, because the effect of fame
artificially inflates some nodes over others, perhaps in ways that even invert the
real distinctions of quality between them.

WORLD OF WEBS

Does this mean that all small worlds are formed from scale-free networks? Not
at all. After all, Watts and Strogatz began the whole story by constructing small
worlds that did not have this property. And it turns out that power grids are not
scale-free either: the electricity grid of southern California, for instance, doesn’t
show the characteristic power-law relation between the connectivity of its nodes.
That might have something to do with the fact that power grids are physical
entities that exist geographically in two dimensions: this makes it very hard to
establish extremely highly connected nodes, because any node can only have a
limited number of near neighbours, and direct links from very distant nodes are
uncommon. The same is true of road networks, which are highly interconnected
but not scale-free, and indeed are not even small-world networks at all: they are
more like regular grids.
Even scale-free networks generally have a limit: in theory there is no ceiling
to the number of links a node might have, but in practice there is. For example,
no actor, however much in demand, can make a million films before they retire
or die. The capacity of an airport is ultimately limited by the number of runways,
facilities, and so on. What this means is that the statistics deviate from a power-
law relationship for very high connectivities so that the probabilities are lower
than the power law predicts. Luís Amaral at Boston University and his
colleagues showed in 2002 that this is true even for the WWW network, simply
because the web is too vast for anyone choosing to make a hyperlink to survey
the entire system before selecting the target: the information about the web has
to be filtered before it can be processed at all, which means that only a subset of
all the available nodes is ever considered.
What about real social networks of friends: are they scale-free? This isn’t
clear, because it is extremely hard to gather data, and harder still to know how
general it is. A study of an acquaintance network among 43 Mormons in Utah,
conducted in 1988, and another of 417 secondary-school students in Wisconsin
in the 1960s, both seem to show a statistical distribution that is not scale-free but
has a well defined average number of links. Nonetheless, these networks are
small worlds in the sense that any one person is linked to any other by only a
small number of links.
There is another important characteristic of scale-free networks that gets
rather lost if we focus only on the power-law scaling of the connectivity of
nodes. If you look at the graphical representation of the Internet in Fig. 6.4c, one
of the things that strikes you first is that it seems to be built up from a number of
clusters: densely radiating groups of nodes that look like the head of a dandelion
in seed, linked to one another by a more sparse web of links. There is, in other
words, a number of distinct communities within this web. On the Internet, these
modules seem to be derived largely from geography: each module corresponds
to the sub-network of an individual country. There are also sub-modules that
reflect particular professional communities, such as military sites. It is no
surprise that a community structure exists in many if not most social networks,
for that is after all a reflection of how our lives tend to be organized. In the
network of scientific collaborations, those people working in the same discipline,
and in the same sub-field of a discipline, are likely to be bound into a
community. Friendship networks might be structured around a neighbourhood or
a workplace. In some sense, modularity is a reflection of the high degree of
clustering characteristic of small worlds.
And yet it is possible to create scale-free networks that do not have this
modular community structure. So the fact that some of them do is telling us that
there is more to the shape of a network than is revealed simply by its
connectivity statistics. But it is not always an easy matter to find this community
structure: to work out what the modules are and where their boundaries lie. One
of the problems is that, because there is a strong element of randomness in the
way these networks grow, two groups of nodes might have only a small number
of links between them purely by chance, rather than because they genuinely
constitute distinct communities in a meaningful sense. The task is then to work
out not just if two groups are joined by few links, but if they are joined by fewer
links than we would expect purely by chance.
Various techniques have been devised for teasing community structure out of
complex networks. Extracting this ‘buried’ information is often of great value,
helping to make sense of what otherwise might look like just a mess of ‘wiring’.
In a metabolic network, for example, it could tell us something about how a
cell’s biochemistry is organized into functional modules. Mark Newman has
used a community-finding scheme to reveal the undercurrents in purchases of
books on US politics through the online bookseller Amazon.com. He studied a
network of 105 recent books, representing nodes, which were linked if the
Amazon site indicated that one book was often bought by those who purchased
the other. The analysis showed a clean split into communities containing only
the ‘liberal’ books and only the ‘conservative’ ones, as well as two small groups
that contained a mixture along with some ‘centrist’ titles. Newman found a
similar political split in links between over a thousand blogs. This clear division,
Newman says, ‘is perhaps testament not only to the widely noted polarization of
the current political landscape in the United States but also to the cohesion of the
two factions’; put another way, it suggests that people only want to read things
that reinforce their own views.
Newman has highlighted another aspect of the deep substructure of complex
networks. In some of them, highly connected nodes show a greater-than-average
propensity to have links with other highly connected nodes, forming what has
become dubbed a ‘rich club’. This phenomenon is known as assortative mixing.
Obviously, the existence of rich clubs in social, economic, and professional
networks could have an enormous impact on the way society functions—it might
imply, for example, that the ‘rich club’ members are able to share privileged
information that percolates only slowly into the rest of the network. Newman has
shown that while neither the random graphs of Erdös and R’nyi nor the scale-
free networks grown from Barabási and Albert’s ‘preferential attachment’ model
has rich clubs, many real-world social networks do, including the collaboration
networks of scientists, film stars, and company directors. On the other hand,
some natural networks are negatively assortative: they show fewer than expected
links between ‘rich’ nodes. This is true of the Internet, and to a small degree of
the WWW; and it also applies to the protein interaction network of yeast, the
neural network of the nematode worm, and the marine food web. In other words,
there is something different about social networks compared to others, either
technological or biological: we humans seem disposed towards forming rich
clubs. Newman has argued that this is because of the strong tendency of social
networks to partition into communities, which is less prevalent in other webs.

SEARCHING THE WEB

One can begin to see, then, that the shape and form of networks can have a
crucial bearing on how it performs its function. For instance, how does the
topology affect the ease with which a network can be navigated? Clearly, we
might expect to be able to get around rather quickly on any network that has the
small-world property of a short average path length between nodes, because we
can always find a shortcut. But that could depend on having a map, for otherwise
how do we know which is the best link to follow? Search engines are of course
invented with the explicit aim of conducting that search for us, but even the best
of them cannot always intuit our wishes from a handful of search criteria, and in
any case the WWW is now so vast that no search engine can index and
encompass it all.
The key characteristic of social networks revealed by Milgram’s epochal
experiment is not simply that they are small-worlds but that they are searchable
small-worlds. It would be of no value that a short social path exists between two
individuals if we were unable to find it. But somehow—and this is what is truly
surprising—we do, at least some of the time. Why is that?
Actually, there is a lot that is swept under the carpet in this ‘some of the
time’. The truth is that the rate of ‘successful searches’ in a case like this is rather
low. One fact about Milgram’s experiment that is often overlooked is that the
starting points in his chains were not by any means all randomly selected
citizens of Omaha, Nebraska. Of the roughly 300, about 100 were stock
investors (and remember that the target was a Boston stockbroker), and another
100 lived not in Nebraska but in Boston! And of the 96 letters that began their
journey from Nebraskans picked genuinely at random, only 18 reached the
destination. In other words, there was a big drop-out rate. Some of this can be
attributed to mere apathy. But Duncan Watts and his colleagues have found that
whether a journey like this is completed seems also to depend on the perceptions
of the participants about their proximity to the target. In 2003 they staged a re-
run of the Milgram experiment using email, which made it easier to enlist
volunteers: they accumulated more than 60,000 in 166 different countries. And
the targets were similarly varied: 18 in total, in 13 different countries, with a
wide variety of backgrounds. Of the 24,163 chains that were started, only 384
were completed, again showing that this kind of search has a high attrition rate.
But one particular target had a much lower drop-out rate than the others: an
American Ivy League professor. The total path lengths for these chains were not
significantly greater than the others; it was just that they did not break halfway.
Since over half of the participants were college-educated Americans, Watts and
colleagues figured that these chains were more likely to run to the end because
the intermediaries believed that they would: they thought it more worthwhile
forwarding a message intended for an American academic than for an Estonian
archivist, because it was more likely to succeed.
All the same, it remains surprising that the small-world nature of social
networks gets exploited at all in these experiments, since there is no way for any
intermediary to know that he or she is really routing the message in an efficient
direction. In 2002 Duncan Watts, Mark Newman and the mathematician Peter
Dodds set out to understand why this happens. They suggested that the
community structure of the network, and in particular the identification of its
members with specific groups, is an essential part of the searchability. They
supposed that each individual mentally breaks down the network into
hierarchical arrangements of groups. They do this in more than one way, for
example imagining groups based on profession and on geographical location:
these different hierarchical pictures overlap. This gives each individual a picture
of their ‘social distance’ from others. Most members of the network lie way over
this social horizon and are not even considered: people think only about their
local links to those a short ‘social distance’ away. The researchers explored a
wide range of ways in which individuals might conceptualize the hierarchy of
the network and forge links between neighbours who are more or less similar to
themselves. They found that in most cases the resulting networks were
searchable in the sense that, if individuals route a message only using their local
view of the network, its average path length between origin and destination is
small.
In other words, people do not need to see the whole map; a parochial view is
enough to ensure efficient routing, as long as everyone feels that they are part of
overlapping communities. It is this multiplicity of communities that is the key to
the social small-world, the researchers claimed, because that is what allows
‘unexpected’ shortcuts to be found. Joe might pass a message to Mary because
they work in the same office; but then Mary passes it to her brother Ray, who
lives in another country. But Joe doesn’t even know that Ray exists—he has
never spoken to Mary about her family. So long as Mary didn’t come into the
conversation, Joe and Ray would say that the social distance between them is
huge. The shortcut via Mary passes through two different ‘social dimensions’—
work and family—and so is not apparent to either Joe or Ray in the absence of
other information, as it would be if, say, Joe, Mary and Ray were all working in
the same profession.
This picture of a ‘multidimensional’ social web is supported by research by
mathematician David Liben-Nowell of Carleton College in Minnesota and his
coworkers. They studied the network formed by around half a million bloggers
in the online community LiveJournal who live in the United States. The
attraction of this network is that members explicitly list other members who they
consider to be friends. This allowed Liben-Nowell and colleagues to deduce how
much friendship depended on geographical proximity. For an online community,
one might expect that geography hardly matters, but in fact the researchers found
that two-thirds of the friendships depend on the physical distance between the
individuals. This of course means that the remaining one-third of the friendships
are independent of geography, and arise because of some perceived similarity in
some other ‘social dimension’.
The researchers then ran another Milgram-style email-routing experiment on
this network. They didn’t actually get the bloggers to do the forwarding, but
instead conducted computer simulations of what would happen if each person
were to send the message to the friend who was geographically nearest to the
target. In this way, 13 per cent of the messages reached the target in just over
four steps. This seemed puzzling, because the computer scientist Jon Kleinberg
had shown that routing a message according to geographical proximity along a
grid does not allow the network to be navigated at all efficiently—there is no
small-world effect.
The reason for that apparent contradiction, said Liben-Nowell and colleagues,
is that the chance of becoming friends does not simply decrease the further apart
they are, but depends on how many other people are nearer: in other words, it
depends on the size of the pool from which geographically closer friends might
be selected. The chance of two people becoming friends depends on how many
others lie in between—which is a question both of geographical distance and of
the density of others in that gap. A network like this is quite different from the
uniform geographical grid that Kleinberg considered, and has the virtue of small-
world navigability.
When you want to pass something like information around on a network, a
small-world nature is beneficial: it allows the distribution to reach all corners of
the net pretty efficiently. But there are some things that we would rather not see
spreading through our social and technological networks—for example, diseases
and computer viruses. Biologists have studied the transmission of disease
through populations for over a century, but it is only recently that they have
started to realize how important a role the topology of the network might play in
this. The standard model for studying epidemics supposes that individuals come
in two classes: healthy and infected. If a healthy person encounters an infected
one, he or she has a chance of becoming infected. But meanwhile, infected
individuals can recover and become healthy again. The disease then spreads at a
rate that depends on the relative probabilities of infection and recovery. This so-
called susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model says that if this spreading
rate exceeds some threshold value, the disease becomes an epidemic, sweeping
through the entire population and persistently infecting some constant
proportion. But if the rate is smaller than this threshold, the disease dies out. The
aim, then, is to keep the spreading rate below the epidemic threshold, for
example by vaccinations that make the infection probability small enough.
The physicists Romualdo Pastor-Satorras and Alessandro Vespignani looked
at how the SIS model plays out if the encounters between people are described
by a scale-free network. This changes the behaviour significantly: there is no
longer an epidemic threshold, and all diseases can pervade the network no matter
how slow-spreading they are. That fits with what we find for computer viruses,
which are transmitted by messages passing through the scale-free email network:
they are frustratingly hard to eradicate completely, remaining active in the
system by persistently infecting a very small fraction of computers.
How about human diseases? The way they spread depends on whether
encounters between people create a scale-free network. In the age of cheap air
travel, there are surely plenty of shortcuts between distant populations, which is
one of the big concerns about the threat posed by new infectious diseases, such
as novel and virulent strains of influenza that threaten to emerge from the avian
flu virus H5N1. In 2005 Dirk Brockmann at the Max Planck Institute for
Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany, and his colleagues
found some evidence that our freedom to travel might create a scale-free small-
world of human contacts. They used data collected by automated systems for
tracking bank notes by their serial number to look at how nearly half a million
dollar notes ‘travelled’ around the contiguous United States, and found that the
relationship between the distance travelled and the time taken for these notes
followed a power law, just as it would if the notes were being passed around on a
scale-free network. If most of these notes move from place to place in people’s
wallets, they give a fair indication of how humans (or at least, Americans) get
about. All the same, this is not by any means a directindication that humans
encounter and infect one another in a scale-free manner.
Some encounters are more intimate than a brushing of elbows on the train,
and may give you rather more than a cold. AIDS is now the third biggest cause
of premature death in the world, and kills two million people a year in sub-
Saharan Africa alone. Networks of sexual contacts are the fatal grid on which
HIV spread, and it is hard to develop effective strategies for attacking the
epidemic unless we know something about the patterns it traces out. If this, too,
is a scale-free net, it would seem that prospects for eradicating the virus entirely
are dim. We simply do not know, however, if this is the case or not. A study of
3,000 Swedes in 2001 suggested that the distribution in the number of sexual
partners over a twelve-month period followed a power-law; but the result
remains controversial.

COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

The implication of these findings is that flows—of information, rumour, and

disease, say—on scale-free networks are not easily disrupted. For human health,
that sounds like a disheartening message. But for technological networks like the
Internet, this aspect of scale-free topologies would appear to be a virtue. It
implies that, if a few links get broken, the network is in no danger of falling
apart. The multitude of pathways privileged with small-world shortcuts means
that you can always find a good alternative for routing your emails. That idea
has been confirmed by Albert, Jeong, and Barabási, who have compared the way
scale-free and other networks (such as random graphs) fragment as more and
more nodes are ‘killed’ (all links to and from them being severed) at random. In
random graphs these ‘connection failures’ soon make the network break apart
into isolated clusters, so that it becomes impossible to reach any point in the web
from any other (Fig. 6.6a). But scale-free networks break up differently: there
remains a large cluster of interconnected nodes even for rather severe amounts of
link failure. This central cluster merely sheds little ‘islands’ of nodes as the
damage gets worse (Fig. 6.6b). The network doesn’t shatter, but gently deflates.
Since breakdowns do happen—servers get jammed or malfunction—this is
surely just the kind of property one would like in a network like the Internet. But
no one designed it that way. Indeed, if they had designed it, they probably would
have chosen some other network topology that was nothing like as resilient. The
Internet acquired this happy feature simply from the way that it grew.
Figure 6.6 How webs fall apart. As increasing numbers of nodes are deactivated,
so that the links to them are effectively severed, at random, a network breaks up
into isolated units. But this happens much more quickly for random graphs (a)
than for scale-free networks (b): the latter tend to ‘deflate’, shedding small
islands but retaining a large, interconnected core.
 Yet scale-free robustness has a cost—one might call it an Achilles’ heel. The
resilience of the network depends on the presence of a few highly connected
hubs: the richest of the rich, which offer shortcuts between many different
regions. Now, if one were to deactivate nodes not at random but in a targeted
fashion, taking out only the most highly connected hubs, the story is very
different. While the resilience of the Internet to random breakdowns is
extraordinary—it has been estimated that a connected cluster of nodes that
reaches right across the network remains even for almost 100 per cent
breakdown of links—it becomes highly vulnerable to an attack that knocks out
the most highly connected nodes first. With a few well-placed shots, you could
scupper the entire network. Albert, Jeong, and Barabási have calculated that if
such a strategy deactivates just 18 per cent of the nodes, the Internet would be
shattered into many tiny pieces. That is now one of the concerns of organizations
worldwide that have been established to combat the threat of cyberwarfare:
intentional disruption of computer networks. With ever more aspects of our lives
being dependent on these information pipelines, from health services to power
supplies, this is emerging as a serious concern.
There is a positive side to this vulnerability of scale-free networks. Since it
seems they exist in the biochemical pathways of living cells, describing the
interactions of protein enzymes for example, then targeting drugs at the ‘hub
sites’ of pathogenic organisms or rogue cells might be a good way of killing
them off. And while diseases may spread faster and become harder to eradicate
in scale-free social networks, immunization and vaccination programmes aimed
at the key hubs—the most highly connected individuals, for example those who
are most sexually active—may have an inordinately positive impact. Barabási
and his colleague Zolta’n Dezsö have shown that treating the hubs against a viral
infection in fact restores the threshold for the virus to spread as an epidemic,
making it possible to eradicate it entirely. Of course, in the real world it may be
far from easy to identify who the hubs are, or to reach and treat them. But an
immunization strategy that does even a rather crude job of finding and treating
highly connected nodes preferentially can reintroduce an epidemic threshold to a
scale-free network, making it easier to contain the virus so that it may die out
naturally.
What, finally, might these studies of network structure have to tell us about
power failures such as the one that turned out the lights of Manhattan? It is not
clear whether any power grids are scale-free networks—possibly some are and
some are not. But in any event, they do in general appear to be small-worlds,
with many shortcuts and small average path lengths between nodes. And this
seems to confer the same kind of mixture of robustness and vulnerability.
Random failures usually do not matter, because alternative routes can be found
for the electricity. But such networks do seem prone to a particular kind of
catastrophic breakdown in which a few local failures create cascades: overloads
get passed on down the line quickly, escalating as they go. This seems to be what
happened in the 2003 US blackout, and very probably in the even larger one a
month later that affected the whole of Italy. A local failure means that the
electrical load gets passed to another part of the grid, which in turn becomes
overloaded and shuts down, and so the problem gets shunted further down the
line, leaving failed links in its wake. It is possible to design networks that do not
have this tendency for cascading breakdown—they are generally not small-
worlds, but require rather long average path lengths between nodes—but for
technological networks that grow without any central planning, such as power
grids and computer networks, design is not really an option.
Yet cascade failures may not be inevitable for small-world networks, so long
as they are understood within the context of the network topology in which they
occur. Once the pattern of the network is taken into account, it might be possible
to tailor an appropriate response strategy. Dirk Helbing at the Dresden
University of Technology and his coworkers have proposed that in such cases
the best strategy is to reinforce the most highly connected nodes first against
failure. That makes intuitive sense and is what you might have guessed anyway
—but only once you appreciate the way the network is configured in the first
place. You first have to see the pattern you are dealing with.
 EPILOGUE
THE THREADS OF THE TAPESTRY

Principles of Pattern

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece
of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums
the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘History’, Essays

It is time to take stock. I hope it has become apparent in the course of these
books that there is going to be no Grand Theory of Pattern awaiting you at the
rainbow’s end. The universe is not made that way. Some physicists have in
recent years encouraged an unfortunate aspiration towards grand unified
pictures, but the world that we encounter, the world of real stuff that we see and
touch, is far too messy for such things.
But this does not mean we must capitulate to a welter of detail. I have shown
that there are fundamental patterning processes that recur in nature, operating
identically in many different settings. Laplacian growth instabilities lead to
snowflakes, or soot, or cracks in pavements and continents. Convection orders
clouds, stones, and pans of hot milk. Reaction—diffusion processes may
generate the leopard’s spots and the graveyards of ants. What nature uses is not a
Law of Pattern but a palette of principles. And there is, I submit, much more
wonder in a world that weaves its own tapestry using countless elegant and
subtle variations, combinations and modifications of a handful of common
processes, than one in which the details become irrelevant and in which a few
recondite equations are supposed to explain everything. To my mind, the
astonishing thing about many natural patterns is not just that we can implicate a
few basic processes that lie at the heart of them all, but that small changes in the
details, in the specific initial or boundary conditions, produce such fantastic
variety—think, for example, of butterfly wings. By the same token, the patterns
of a river network and of a retinal nerve are both the same and utterly different.
It is not enough to call them both fractal, or even to calculate a fractal
dimension. To explain a river network fully, we must take into account the
complicated realities of sediment transport, of changing meteorological
conditions, of the specific vagaries of the underlying bedrock geology—things
that have nothing to do with nerve cells.
The late Rolf Landauer, an uncommonly perceptive and broad-thinking
physicist, has expressed very pithily this need to resist over-enthusiastic
aspirations to the universal: ‘A complex system is exactly that; there are many
things going on simultaneously. If you search carefully, you can find your
favorite toy: fractals, chaos, self-organized criticality, Lotka–Volterra predator–
prey oscillations, etc., in some corner, in a relatively well developed and isolated
way. But do not expect any single simple insight to explain it all.’
Perhaps it is a shame to begin a summary chapter with a caution against too
much summarizing, but that is for the best. For the ideas that form the backbone
of our understanding of spontaneous pattern formation seem so powerful, so all-
encompassing, that they are all too often paraded as the keys to a theory of
everything. Even D’Arcy Thompson would not have wanted us to believe that.
And yet what is extraordinary and thrilling is that so many pattern-forming
systems have so much in common, to the extent that by understanding one we
can predict a great deal about the others. This realization has made a delicious
mockery of the traditional, rigid divisions between scientific disciplines, so that
physicist, economist, ecologist, chemical engineer, and geologist can all talk to
one another—and in the same language. When this happens, something very
exciting is going on in science.
Yet we have seen that many of the ideas behind pattern formation are not new.
Oscillating chemical reactions were known in 1901; convection cells showed up
around 1900; and Kepler sensed the reason for the sixfold symmetry of a
snowflake in the seventeenth century. But D’Arcy Thompson was unable to
persuade most of his peers of the importance of form and pattern in the 1920s,
and only in the past two decades or so has pattern formation emerged as
anything like an identifiable field of study in its own right. Why is that?
One reason is the explosion in computer power. Many of the theoretical ideas
about patterning are tough to test experimentally, since there are so many factors
to bring simultaneously under control; but as we have noted again and again,
computers allow researchers to perform ‘ideal’ experiments in which everything
can be repeated exactly and complicating factors included or excluded at will.
Many theoretical models are simple in principle but utterly impossible to test by
manual number-crunching—the calculations would take for ever if done by
hand. But although this increase in computational capacity has provided
scientists with perhaps the most important technological tool currently at their
disposal, it also serves to underline the phenomenal achievements of early
researchers such as Michael Faraday, Lord Kelvin, and Lord Rayleigh, Geoffrey
Taylor, and Andrei Kolmogorov Principles of Pattern, who had to rely on their
exquisite intuition alone to deduce the essential physics of pattern-forming
processes.
I believe there is another reason, little emphasized but equally important, for
the recent development of ideas in pattern formation. This is the maturation
since the mid-1980s of a field of theoretical physics that provides much of the
framework for understanding the features that frequently characterize
spontaneous patterning, such as abrupt, global changes of state and scaling laws.
The field is the study of phase transitions and critical phenomena, and it is the
largely unseen bedrock of all physics today. I shall say more about this discipline
in what follows.
Let me now try to pull together some of the threads that have run, more or
less perceptibly, through all the previous chapters. They do not, even
collectively, constitute a ‘theory of patterns’. Rather, these ideas are like stepping
stones that lead us through the turbulent ebb and flow of pattern and form in the
physical and natural world.

COMPETING FORCES

Spontaneous patterns typically represent a compromise between forces that

impose conflicting demands. The ordered architectures adopted by certain
polymers and soap-like molecules (Fig. 7.1: see Book I, Chapter 2) are an
elegant solution to the requirement of keeping the structure’s surface area and
curvature small while also packing molecules together efficiently. The
expanding waves and the static spot and stripe patterns of some chemical
mixtures (Fig. 7.2: see Book I, Chapters 3, 4) result from a delicate balance
between reaction and diffusion of the molecular components, and between short-
ranged amplification and long-ranged inhibition of their chemical reactions. The
bulbous pseudopodia of viscous fingering (this book, Chapter 2) are the
manifestation of competition between an instability that generates branches at
the interface, and surface tension, which limits its size scale.
Snowflakes are the product of a similar compromise forged in an environment
that is imprinted with an intrinsic microscopic symmetry. Trains of breaking-
wave vortices appear in fluid flows when an instability that excites waves wins
out over the tendency of viscosity to suppress them (Book II, Chapter 3)—a
victory from which a preferred patterning size emerges.
Fig. 7.1: Ordered structures in co-polymers: a balance between surface area and
curvature of the interfaces of domains and the efficient packing of molecules.
(Photo: Edwin Thomas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)

Competition lies at the heart of the beauty and complexity of natural pattern
formation. If the competition is too one-sided, all form disappears, and one gets
either unstructured, shifting randomness, or featureless homogeneity—bland in
either event. Patterns live on the edge, in a fertile borderland between these
extremes where small changes can have large effects. This is, I suppose, what we
are to infer from the clichéd phrase ‘the edge of chaos’. Pattern appears when
competing forces banish uniformity but cannot quite induce chaos. It sounds like
a dangerous place to be, but it is where we have always lived.
Fig. 7.2: Spirals, stripes, and spots in oscillating chemical reactions. (Photos: a
Stefan Müller, University of Magdeburg; b, c, Harry Swinney, University of
Texas at Austin.)

SYMMETRY BREAKING

When spontaneous patterns appear in systems that are initially uniform, this
lowers or breaks the original symmetry. That is why it is important not to
confuse symmetry and pattern: high symmetry does not by any means imply the
richest patterns, and indeed often those that look most striking have rather low
symmetry, or none at all. On the other hand, symmetry tends to break a little at a
time, and we may find that the least symmetrical patterns are those that appear
when the driving force responsible for them is greatest, so that the system is
furthest away from an equilibrium state. I shall say something shortly about why
symmetry breaks away from equilibrium. At this point, we need appreciate only
that symmetry breaking is not like laying a tiled floor. A hexagonal cellular
arrangement like that of Rayleigh–Bénard convection (Fig. 7.3: Book II, Chapter
3) is not a matter of imposing cells of an arbitrary shape, one by one, in an inert
medium. Rather, the medium becomes everywhere at once imbued with a
‘hexagon-forming tendency’, once the driving force (here the heating rate)
exceeds the pattern-forming threshold. It then takes only the smallest fluctuation
to release this ‘hexagon-ness’ globally. The hexagonal array seems to rise out of
the floor, you might say.
Fig. 7.3: A hexagonal array of convection cells in Rayleigh–Bénard convection.
(Image: David Cannell, University of California at Santa Barbara.)

NON-EQUILIBRIUM

Nearly all the pattern-forming systems in these books are out of equilibrium—
that is to say, they are not in their thermodynamically most favourable state.
Once scientists considered such systems to be unapproachable, perhaps even
unseemly. Thermodynamics, the science of change that developed initially as an
engineering discipline in the nineteenth century, was intended to describe the
equilibrium state of systems. It told one about the direction of change, and
allowed one to calculate the amount of useful work that could be extracted from
that change; but what actually took place during a change was something that
classical thermodynamics could barely touch. It was a pretty good tool for
chemical and mechanical engineers who wanted to gauge the performance of
their machines. But it offered a rather artificial view of the world in which
everything happens in a series of jumps between stable states that do not
otherwise alter over time. That is not very like the world we know.
Thermodynamics was silent in the face of the uncomfortable fact that some
processes never seem to reach equilibrium. A river does not simply empty itself
into the sea in one glorious, ephemeral rush—the water is cycled back into the
sky and redeposited in the highlands for another journey. And so will it always
be, while the sun still shines.
Out of this somewhat restrictive picture, however, emerged the idea of an
arrow of time. Nearly all processes seem to have a preferred direction: they go
one way but not the reverse. Heat flows from hot to cold, an ink droplet
disperses in water. These processes are said to be irreversible. One-way
processes fit with our intuition—ink droplets do not re-form—but they become
somewhat puzzling when we look closely at the microscopic events behind
them. In the mathematical equations that describe how a particle of ink pigment
moves in water, there is no arrow of time: you could play a film of the particle’s
motion backwards and not notice the difference, nor appear to break any
physical laws. It is only when you look at the behaviour of the whole ensemble
of particles that you would notice anything odd when time is reversed and the
droplet coalesces from a glass of uniformly dilute ink.
Most scientists agree that irreversibility has its roots in the second law of
thermodynamics, which states that in a system isolated from its surroundings (so
that it cannot exchange energy or matter), the direction of change is always
towards greater entropy, which loosely means, towards greater disorder. This is a
law enforced not by physics but by probability. It emerges when a system has
many choices of how to arrange its components: there are simply many more
disordered arrangements than ordered ones. We encountered the second law in
Book I, where I explained that it prompted objections to the idea of oscillating
chemical reaction in the 1950s. As entropy is in some sense a measure of
disorder, the second law seems to pose a big problem for the spontaneous
appearance of pattern.
Thermodynamics allows one to predict what a system at equilibrium will look
like: it tells us that such systems adopt states for which the total energy is as
small as it can be.* This is the energy minimization criterion that we saw in
operation in Book I, controlling the shapes of soap films. Is there an analogous
criterion that determines what the state of a non-equilibrium system is?
The thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems is concerned not with some
end point in which entropy has increased in relation to the initial state; rather, it
considers the process of becoming, of how change occurs. Since the second law
specifies that an irreversible change leaves a system with more entropy than it
began with, change produces entropy. When the system reaches its new
equilibrium, entropy production ceases. So the process of change seems to be
bound up with the issue of entropy production.
In the 1930s the Norwegian-born scientist Lars Onsager began to explore that
connection. He considered change driven by only a small departure from
equilibrium. Under these conditions Onsager deduced universal laws relating the
driving forces to the rates of entropy production. For this work he was awarded
the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1963. The Russian-born chemist Ilya Prigogine,
working in Brussels, added an important element to the picture by showing that,
in this near-equilibrium case, non-equilibrium systems tend to behave in a way
that minimizes the rate of entropy production. If prevented from reaching
equilibrium (where the rate of entropy production is zero), the system will
instead settle into a steady but dynamic state in which entropy is produced at the
lowest possible rate. Here, then, was a criterion for determining the preferred
state of a system out of (but close to) equilibrium.
Nothing in this prescription, however, gives any hint that away from
equilibrium a system may stumble into a patterned state with orderly structure,
like Bénard’s convection cells or Turing’s spots. States like this tend to emerge
rather far from equilibrium, where the equations formulated by Onsager and
others no longer apply and Prigogine’s minimum entropy production rule can
break down. Where do they come from?
During the 1950s and 1960s, Prigogine and his colleague Paul Glansdorff
attempted to extend the treatment of non-equilibrium thermodynamics to the
more interesting far-from-equilibrium situation. They were able to show that, as
the force driving a system away from equilibrium increases, the steady state of
minimal entropy production reaches some crisis point where it breaks down and
becomes transformed to another state. Technically speaking, there is a
bifurcation—literally, a branching in two—at which the evolution of the steady
state splits into two branches, presenting a choice of new states that the system
can adopt (Fig. 7.4).
Fig. 7.4: A bifurcation occurs when a stable state develops an instability that
offers the system a choice of two new states. A ‘pitchfork’ bifurcation like that
shown here commonly occurs as a system is driven further out of equilibrium.
 What are these new states? The theory of Prigogine and Glansdorff said little
about that; but it seemed reasonable to suppose that they might correspond to the
self-organized structures and patterns that were known to appear far from
equilibrium. To progress any further, however, we first need to appreciate how
these regular or ordered non-equilibrium states are fundamentally different from
superficially similar ordered states in equilibrium systems.

DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURES

Regularity is not rare. A swinging pendulum, a bouncing ball, the ‘greengrocer’s

stall’ atomic packing of a crystal, the yearly passage of the Earth around the Sun:
all are periodic in space or time. But the regular hexagonal lattice of Rayleigh–
Bénard convection differs from the hexagonal atomic lattice of a crystal like
copper metal. The latter is an equilibrium structure whose periodicity is
determined by some characteristic dimension of the components—here, the sizes
of the atoms. The former, meanwhile, is maintained away from equilibrium by a
throughflow of energy, which it dissipates in the process, thereby generating
entropy. Stop the input of energy—let the top-to-bottom temperature gradient
equalize—and the pattern goes away. Likewise, the oscillations of the Belousov–
Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction (Book I, Chapter 3) persist only while the reaction is
fed with fresh reagents and the products are removed. Patterns that are supported
away from equilibrium by the generation of entropy are called dissipative
structures.
 In contrast to most equilibrium structures, the spatial scale of the pattern
features in a dissipative structure bears no relation to the size of its constituents.
The size of convection cells is much, much larger than the size of the circulating
molecules, for example. Furthermore, this size scale persists in the face of
perturbations. A convecting fluid may lose its pattern temporarily if stirred, but
once the disturbance has passed, the same structure reforms. The system
‘remembers’ how it is supposed to look. These robust dissipative structures are
said to be governed by an attractor: a place to which they are ‘anchored’ in the
abstract space of parameters describing the system. An example of such an
attractor is the limit cycle of the oscillating BZ reaction. The opposite of a
dissipative structure is a conservative structure, which possesses no attractors
and so can be altered arbitrarily. An example is the orbit of a planet around the
Sun: if the radius of the orbit is altered (say, by a catastrophic collision with
another body), it stays that way rather than returning to its former value.
If a dissipative structure is ‘kicked’ too hard, however, it may find itself closer
to a different attractor—a quite different state or pattern—and end up being
drawn towards that instead. Attractors are like dips in a hilly landscape: if you
get pushed over a crest, you fall down into a different basin. The point here,
then, is that non-equilibrium systems tend to change not gradually but in discrete
jumps between different dissipative attractor states. Let’s look at this in more
detail.

INSTABILITIES, THRESHOLDS, AND BIFURCATIONS

Most of the patterns that I have described appear suddenly. One moment there is
nothing; then you turn the dial of the driving force up a notch, and everything is
abruptly different. Stripes appear, or dunes, or pulsations. This seems to be the
nature of most symmetry-breaking processes: they happen all at once. In that
respect, they resemble phase transitions in equilibrium thermodynamics.
Phase transitions are generally abrupt jumps from one equilibrium state of
matter to another: from ice to water, water to vapour, and magnet to non-magnet.
These are ‘all-over’ transformations. When water cools through its freezing
point, we don’t find part of it turning to ice and the rest remaining liquid.* Below
zero degrees centigrade all the water is ready to become ice, and will surely do
so given enough time. And this is an all-or-nothing affair: the temperature need
be only a fraction above freezing point for all the ice to have melted once
equilibrium is reached. A fraction below, and all is frozen.
 In other words, there is a threshold that, once crossed, leaves the entire
system prone to a change in state. Just the same is true for many pattern-forming
processes. Convective patterns, as we observed above, appear above a threshold
heating rate, and vortices in fluid flow above a threshold flow rate. The path of a
crack goes crazy above a particular crack speed.
In addition, the change in state during an equilibrium phase transition may
involve a breaking of symmetry. Crystalline ice has an ordered molecular
structure (in fact it has many ordered structures), while liquid water is disorderly
at the molecular scale. Again, you could be forgiven for thinking that symmetry
is therefore broken during melting, but in fact it is the other way around:
symmetry is broken during freezing, because whereas the liquid state is isotropic
(all directions in space are equivalent) the crystal structure of ice identifies
certain directions as ‘special’.
Thus equilibrium phase transitions, like the abrupt transitions that
characterize much of pattern formation, are spontaneous, global, and often
symmetry-breaking changes of state that happen when a threshold is crossed.
Some of these transitions involve a straightforward rearrangement of one
state into another. But there are classes of both equilibrium and non-equilibrium
transitions that offer a choice of two alternatives for the new state, which are
equivalent but not identical. Think of the formation of convection roll cells.
Adjacent rolls turn over in opposite directions, but any particular roll could
rotate either one way or the other as long as all the others switch direction too.
Above the convection threshold, there is a choice of two mirror-image states.
Which is selected? Clearly, there is nothing to favour one over the other, and the
issue is decided by pure chance. The same is true of the rotation of plughole
whirlpools, unless some small outside influence tips the balance.
The equilibrium behaviour of a magnetic material like iron displays a
comparable choice. In iron’s magnetized state, all the atoms act like little bar
magnets with their north and south poles aligned. If you heat a magnetized piece
of iron above 770 degrees centigrade (its so-called Curie point) this alignment is
lost, because it is overwhelmed by the random, jiggling effect of heat. The
magnetic fields from each atom then cancel out on average, and the piece of iron
as a whole is no longer magnetic. This abrupt change at the Curie point from a
magnet to a non-magnet is an example of a phase transition. It might seem that
this phase transition involves a single choice: either the iron is magnetic or not.
But in fact there are two possibilities as the metal is cooled from a non-
magnetized, randomly oriented state through the Curie point: the atomic
magnetic poles can all point either in one direction or the other (Fig. 7.5a). The
states are entirely equivalent,* and again the choice depends on random
fluctuations that tip the balance. (You may wonder how, or if, this random choice
can be made the same way throughout the entire system. I’ll come back to this).
The situation is like a ball perched on top of a perfectly symmetrical hill (Fig.
7.5b): it is unstable at the top and has to roll down one side or the other, but
which way it goes is unpredictable and at the mercy of imperceptible
disturbances.
Fig. 7.5: A magnetic material such as iron undergoes a bifurcation when cooled
through its so-called Curie point (at temperature Tc), where the material becomes
spontaneously magnetic (a). This happens because the atomic magnetic poles,
represented here as arrows, all line up in the same direction; above Tc that is
prevented by the randomizing influence of heat. Below Tc the magnetization can
point in one of two equivalent directions. This kind of bifurcation is analogous to
the situation of a ball perched on top of a hill between two identical valleys (b);
it must roll down one way or another, but the choice is arbitrary.

Freezing and melting of water might seem rather similar to this magnetic
transition, in the sense that they too involve atomic-scale order being
overwhelmed by, or recovered from, thermal randomness. But there is an
important difference, somewhat technical, but important. Freezing and melting
are said to be first-order phase transitions. Among the distinguishing features of
these are the fact that the switch in state begins at one or more randomly selected
points and spreads from there throughout the whole system. Freezing starts from
a little ‘seed’ or nucleus of ice somewhere in the water. And there is a step-like
change in key properties of the system: in this case, in the density (water is
denser than ice). And it is possible for the less stable state to persist beyond the
transition threshold in a precarious state that is said to be metastable, and which
is liable to switch at any time. Water can be supercooled below freezing point
without turning to ice, if it is free from small particles on which ice crystals
might nucleate. This means that in practice the transition might happen at a
different point from where equilibrium thermodynamics says it should and,
specifically, the threshold might be different as the system passes through the
transition in one direction (freezing) to the other (melting). This is called
hysteresis. Finally, first-order phase transitions may but do not have to involve
symmetry-breaking.
The spontaneous magnetization of iron at the Curie point, on the other hand,
is an example of a second-order or critical phase transition. The magnetization
changes abruptly but continuously as the system goes through the transition—
there is no sudden jump from one value to another (see Fig. 7.5a). Second-order
and other critical phase transitions always involve symmetry breaking. And there
can be no hysteresis: the switch to a new state cannot be delayed. It doesn’t
depend on the formation and growth of some nucleus of the new state, but
happens through a kind of global convulsion, driven by the random fluctuations
of the components.
Now, many of the pattern-forming bifurcations that I have discussed are
analogous to critical phase transitions—they are called supercritical bifurcations,
and they lead to symmetry breaking. The onset of convection is like this, as is
the switch between hexagonal and striped chemical Turing patterns (Fig. 7.2).
But a few pattern-forming processes are subcritical bifurcations, analogous to
first-order phase transitions, such as the switch between spiral and target patterns
in convecting fluids (Fig. 7.6: see Book II, Chapter 3). This is why both spirals
and targets can coexist in the same pattern. These distinctions may seem rather
esoteric; but I’ll show shortly that the details of what happens at a critical phase
transition provide important clues to how patterns arise away from equilibrium.
Fig. 7.6: Convection patterns in a fluid may switch from targets to spirals in an
abrupt transition. But because this transition is of a technical type called
subcritical, targets and spirals can coexist. (Photo: Michel Assenheimer,
Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot.)
THE SOLUTIONS REVEAL MORE THAN THE EQUATIONS

These analogies with phase transitions are useful, but they don’t provide any
kind of rigorous mathematical description of pattern-forming bifurcations.
Physicists like analogies, but they prefer rigour. Attempts to develop a more
concrete description of what happens at a symmetry-breaking bifurcation in non-
equilibrium systems began in earnest in 1916 when Lord Rayeigh looked for a
theory that would explain Henri Bénard’s convection patterns. In the 1920s,
Geoffrey Taylor attempted much the same for the case of Taylor–Couette flow
between rotating cylinders (Book II, Chapter 6). As I explained in that volume, a
thorough treatment of any problem in fluid flow must start with the Navier–
Stokes equation—Newton’s law of motion applied to fluids, which relates the
changes in fluid velocity at every point to the forces that act on the fluid. Both
Rayleigh and Taylor looked for the solution to the Navier–Stokes equation
appropriate to their respective systems close to equilibrium—that is, when the
driving force for patterning was very small. They then examined how this ‘base
state’ would respond as the system was driven increasingly far from equilibrium.
For the case of convection, the base state is one in which no flow at all
occurs: if the temperature difference between the top and bottom of the fluid is
small enough, heat flows simply by conduction through the fluid, just as it does
when it spreads through a solid. The question is then, ‘does the base state
remains stable if it is disturbed a little?’ Rayleigh considered an all but
imperceptible wavy disturbance in the fluid, with a particular wavelength. Below
the critical Rayleigh number Rac (a measure of the bottom-to-top temperature
difference) at which convection begins, such perturbations die away over time
regardless of the wavelength, and the system returns to the base state. But
exactly at Rac, something stirs: one particular wavelength neither decays nor
grows, although all others decay. And just above Rac the ‘special’ wavy
perturbation grows: a pattern with this wavelength develops. As Ra increases,
the range of possible wavelengths of the convection pattern broadens steadily.
Above Rac the base state is still a solution to the Navier–Stokes equation for the
system—but it is an unstable solution, since the slightest disturbance will trigger
the appearance of a pattern at one of the allowed wavelengths.
The key point about this approach, which is called linear stability analysis, is
that it can be applied to a wide range of systems that undergo spontaneous
patterning—not just those in fluids that obey the Navier–Stokes equation. A
similar kind of analysis can be carried out, for example, for the equations that
describe reaction–diffusion systems. Some researchers have attempted to
construct simplified ‘model equations’ that describe the generic features of
pattern-forming systems such as these while avoiding the complexity (and thus
the intractability) of, say, the full Navier–Stokes equation. They are general-
purpose equations for predicting patterns arising from an instability in an
unpatterned base state, regardless of the detailed nature of the particular system
in question.
Perhaps the most important message to have emerged from these studies of
instabilities is that we do not necessarily have a complete understanding of a
system once we know the equations that govern it. What we really want to know
are the particular solutions to those equations. The latter need not be obvious
from the former. That is a point worth remembering in all of mathematical
science. The English physicist Freeman Dyson says that ‘to discover the right
equations was all that mattered’ to Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer in
their later years. One might say the same about some physicists working today to
develop a ‘theory of everything’. But if you take this view, then fluid dynamics
was solved once we could write down the Navier–Stokes equation. Yet if we had
stopped there, we would never have guessed at the rich variety of solutions that
it held in store even for relatively simple experimental situations. In fact,
sometimes even knowing the mathematical solutions is not enough: we need to
do experiments to interpret what they are telling us.

PATTERN SELECTION

Linear stability analysis can reveal the point at which a non-equilibrium system
is driven across the threshold of pattern formation. But can it tell us anything
about the pattern that results? Exactly at the threshold, there is (at least for the
cases considered by Rayleigh and Taylor) a single ‘marginally unstable’
wavelength that defines the characteristic pattern scale. But how does this length
scale manifest itself—as stripes, spots, or perhaps travelling waves? And once
the threshold is surpassed, an increasing range of patterning wavelengths may
become stable. Which wavelength is selected?
This question is not peculiar to these examples in fluid dynamics. Just about
any system with pattern-forming potential faces choices: it may have a gallery of
designs from which to select. Soap molecules on the water surface (Book I,
Chapter 2), metal deposits grown at electrodes (this book, Chapter 2), bacterial
colonies (Book I, Chapter 5 and this book, Chapter 2), jumping sand grains
(Book II, Chapter 4)—they all confront a catalogue of riches. Which to choose?
There is no universal way to answer this question. Yet there is in this respect a
major distinction between equilibrium and non-equilibrium systems. The former
may also have several choices of pattern and form, but there is in that case a
simple rule (in principle) for deciding the best choice: as we have seen, at
equilibrium a system will always seek to adopt the configuration that has the
lowest free energy. This means that balls roll down hills, iron rusts in air, water
below freezing point turns to ice. A few of the complex patterns I have discussed
do form under equilibrium conditions: for example, the shapes of soap bubbles
and the self-organization of hybrid polymers (Book I, Chapter 2). If we know the
various contributing factors to the free energy, we can predict the selected
pattern in these cases by finding the shape that minimizes it.
What about non-equilibrium systems? Might there be some analogous
‘minimization principle’ for them? I shall return to this question shortly.
We can first make a few general observations about how patterns form away
from equilibrium. This normally involves symmetry breaking; and symmetry
tends to break in stages, a little at a time, as the system is driven harder and
harder. This alone enables us to understand why two types of pattern, stripes and
hexagons, are particularly common. The simplest way to break the symmetry of
a uniform, ‘flat’ (two-dimensional) system such as a shallow layer of fluid—that
is, the way to break as little symmetry as possible—is to impose a periodic,
wavy variation in just one direction (Fig. 7.7a), which produces parallel bands,
stripes, or rolls. Parallel to the stripes, symmetry is not broken: as we travel
through the medium in this direction, we see no change in its character. It is only
in the perpendicular direction that we can identify the broken symmetry:
travelling in this direction, we see a periodic change from one state to another
and back again. Thus, stripe-like patterns are often the first to appear from a
uniform, flat system. That is what we see for sand ripples and in the appearance
of convection and Taylor–Couette roll cells.
Fig. 7.7: Breaking symmetry by degrees. The simplest way to break the symmetry
of a uniform two-dimensional system is to impose periodic variations in one
direction, creating stripes (a). When symmetry is broken in both dimensions,
square or triangular cells result (b). In the latter case, the resulting pattern can be
a triangular or a hexagonal lattice of cells.

After breaking symmetry periodically in one dimension, the next ‘minimal’

pattern in a two-dimensional system involves breaking it in the other, dividing
up the system into compartments or grids. If the state is to remain ordered and as
symmetric as possible, there are only two options: to impose the periodic
variation perpendicular to the rolls, creating square cells, or to impose two such
variations at 60° angles, creating triangles or hexagons (Fig. 7.7b). So the
square, triangular and hexagonal patterns that we have seen in Turing patterns
(Book I, Chapter 4), in convection (Book II, Chapter 3) and in shaken sand
(Book II, Chapter 4) are no mystery. They arise simply because the geometric
properties of space constrain the ways in which symmetry can be broken.
These hand-waving arguments are not, however, a reliable guide for
determining exactly what kind of broken symmetry will arise in any particular
case. For that, one needs to look into the messy specifics. For example, the
question of whether stripes/rolls or hexagons will be preferred has no universal
answer. And a linear stability analysis of convection will not help you to answer
that: you have to use a more sophisticated level of theory to discover that rolls
are generally favoured. Qualitatively we can understand this preference on the
grounds that rolls do not distinguish between upflow and downflow (what goes
up on one side of the cell is mirrored by what goes down on the other), whereas
hexagonal cells do: upflow occurs in their centre and downflow at the edges. So
rolls are geometrically symmetrical about the plane midway between the top and
bottom of the fluid, but hexagonal cells are not. If this midline symmetry is
broken, however—for example, if the warmer fluid near the bottom is
significantly less viscous than the cooler fluid towards the top (which is quite
possible)—then hexagonal cells might appear instead. In the case of the Turing
instability of reaction—diffusion systems, on the other hand, hexagonal spots are
usually the default option.
The other aspect of pattern selection for these relatively simple cases is the
size of the features: the wavelength of the stripes or the separation of the
hexagonal spots. Again, it is not possible to identify a single criterion that
determines this. For Rayleigh–Bènard convection, we saw that linear stability
analysis can be used to calculate the wavelength of the instability at the onset of
patterning. But above that threshold there is a range of allowed wavelengths, and
then the width of the roll cells becomes dependent on the history of the system:
how it reached the convecting state. This size may in fact vary throughout the
system, or may change over time. In a chemical Turing system, meanwhile, the
scale of the pattern is set by how fast the ingredients diffuse (recall that one
component acts as an activator to initiate the formation of a pattern element, and
the other as an inhibitor that suppresses other elements nearby). And we have
seen that these reaction–diffusion systems may generate moving patterns
(travelling waves) rather than stationary ones. That’s what happens if, above the
patterning threshold, a wavy disturbance to the system doesn’t just grow in
strength but also itself moves.
Fig. 7.8: Bifurcations in many non-equilibrium systems come in a sequential
cascade as the system is driven further from equilibrium (here from left to right).
At each bifurcation, the number of states of the system doubles. In an oscillating
system such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, each bifurcation corresponds
to a period-doubling: it takes two, then four, then eight cycles for the system to
return to a given state. This cascade structure gets increasingly finely branched
and eventually gives way to non-periodic, chaotic behaviour, seen here as a
dense ‘dust’ of dots.
 As we have noted, abrupt transitions between different patterns commonly
occur at threshold values of the driving force. There is a common tendency
(particularly clear for fluid flow) for the patterns to become more ornate—we
might say more complex—as the system is driven harder and harder. This
sequence of increasing complexity is also evident in the oscillating Belousov–
Zhabotinsky reaction conducted in a continuous-flow stirred-tank reactor (Book
I, Chapter 3). As the flow rate of chemicals through the vessel increases, the
oscillations undergo a series of period-doubling bifurcations so that the cycle
repeats with every oscillation, then with every second oscillation, then with
every fourth and so on. This can be depicted as a cascade of bifurcations (Fig.
7.8). One might liken this very crudely to the excitation of additional harmonics
as a trumpeter blows harder. Eventually the oscillations become chaotic, as
though the system becomes overwhelmed with options. Then the cascade loses
its branched structure and breaks up into a dense forest of spots—and we lose
sight of any order at all.

THE RACE FOR DOMINANCE

When patterns are growing, pattern selection may depend on how, or how
rapidly, the different candidates advance. We saw in Chapter 1 that the
characteristic scale of branches on a dendritic crystal is set by the condition that
the growth speed just about balances the tendency for the tip to split: there is a
unique, ‘marginally stable’ pattern where growth only just outpaces a propensity
to split repeatedly. In other cases, for example non-equilibrium electrode
position or the growth of a bacterial colony, it has been proposed that the pattern
selected is simply that which grows fastest and which therefore outruns the
others. But it is not clear that this is a criterion that applies to branching growth
in general. Pattern selection is also influenced by noise—by which I mean the
inevitable randomness in the environment, such as that supplied by thermal
fluctuations. Noise does not necessarily affect all patterns equally; it may favour
some over others.

DEFECTS AND BOUNDARIES

Very often patterns that appear far above the initial instability threshold are far
from symmetrical; they are laced through with ‘mistakes’, sometimes to such an
extent that all appearance of symmetry is lost. For example, we saw how the roll
cells of convection or the stripes of Turing structures can merge, and how the
hexagonal cells of Rayleigh–Bénard convection can become grossly imperfect
honeycombs. Through an accumulation of such distortions, parallel stripes can
become bent into more or less disordered wavy patterns, and a hexagonal lattice
of spots can disintegrate into a jumble. This gives us something akin to the
stripes of zebras and the spots of the leopard. In some patterns of this sort,
perfect regularity is only ever a kind of Platonic dream—the Giant’s Causeway
merely hints at its relation to the honeycomb. Notice, however, that even in cases
where disorder overwhelms all semblance of symmetry, we can still identify
order of a kind: the average distance between spots or stripes, or the average
number of sides of a polygonal pattern element, remains more or less constant.
Defects have their own logic and taxonomy, enabling us to ‘decode the mess’
by considering how generic defect structures arise from characteristic
deformations of the underlying pattern (Book II, Chapter 3). In attempting this,
scientists may often draw on a rich existing theory of defect formation developed
from studies of crystals and related materials, such as liquid crystals.
The principles I have adduced so far apply to ‘infinite’ systems, by which I
mean ones for which we ignore the boundaries. But of course no real pattern-
forming system is infinite—they always have edges.* If the size of the system is
vastly greater than that of the pattern’s characteristic length scale, the effects of
edges may be negligible except close to the edges themselves. Commonly,
though, this is not the case: the pattern may be influenced throughout by the size
or shape of the ‘container’. We saw in Book I, for example, how either hoops or
spots could be selected from the same pattern-forming mechanism on animal
tails, depending on the size and shape of the embryonic tail when the pattern is
laid down during development. And, more generally, we saw how the patterns of
different animal pelts—a two-tone division of the whole body, say, or a few large
blotches or a multitude of small spots—can be determined by the relative size of
the embryo at the patterning stage. On ladybird wings, both the size and the
curvature of the surfaces may affect the patterns.
The shape of a boundary can occasionally change a pattern to something
qualitatively different from how it would look in an ‘infinite’ container. In long,
rectangular trays, convection rolls tend to form stripes, whereas in circular
dishes the rolls curl up into concentric circles (Fig. 7.9a, b). Moreover, the need
for a whole number of pattern features to fit within the container may determine
the wavelength, just as the wavelength and thus the frequency of an organ note is
determined by the length of the pipe. In some systems, the pattern may change
locally to adapt to the presence of a boundary—in Fig. 7.9c, for example,
concentric roll cells give way to short parallel rolls at the edges, so that the rolls
can meet the boundary at right angles (which is a more stable configuration).
Fig. 7.9: Coping with boundaries. In these convection patterns, the shape of the
vessels has imposed particular shapes on the global arrangements of the roll-like
cells. (Images: a, from Cross and Hohenberg, 1993, after LeGal, 1986; b, David
Cannell, University of California at Santa Barbara; c, from Cross and
Hohenberg, 1993.)

CORRELATIONS AND CRITICAL POINTS

Many of these self-made patterns seem to acquire a miraculous ability to

measure and mark out space. It is one thing to talk mathematically about a
‘marginally stable’ wavelength, but how can we understand this in terms of the
interactions between the fundamental components of the system? The scale of
sand dunes, for example, is so far removed from the size of the grains
themselves, or of the hops they make when landing on a surface, that it is hard to
imagine where the pattern scale really comes from. How do the grains ‘know’
where to start and stop piling up into a new dune? Just the same is true for
Turing patterns: the size of the molecules and atoms in the chemical mixture, and
the range of the interactions between them, is minuscule (about a tenth of a
millionth of a millimetre), yet the patterns have length scales big enough for us
to see with our unaided eyes, perhaps several millimetres or so. How on earth
can interactions on these unimaginably tiny scales give rise to patterns millions
of times larger?
The implication seems to be that the components of the system are able to
‘communicate’ with each other over distances much longer than those to which
they are accustomed at equilibrium. Think of the rolls that appear in Rayleigh–
Bènard convection. Before the onset of convection, the molecules are moving
about throughout the quiescent fluid in a random, disorderly way; each molecule
barely takes heed of what its immediate neighbours are doing, let alone what is
happening a millimetre or so away, many millions of molecules distant. Yet
above the patterning threshold this independence has been lost, and the
molecular motions have (on average) become correlated over these vast
distances. That is to say, if we were to observe the molecular motions on the
descending edge of one of the roll cells, we would know that statistically
identical motions were being executed by molecules one wavelength away—and
two, and three, and so forth throughout the vessel. This kind of long-ranged
correlation, according to which molecules behave coherently over distances that
far outstrip the sphere of their own influence, is characteristic of many pattern-
forming systems.
How is it possible? Are the molecules able to relay their individual, tiny
influences from neighbours to neighbours over such scales? That is quite out of
the question: in the frenzied environment of a hot liquid, it is like trying to play
Chinese whispers at a rock concert.
The appearance of long-ranged correlations in systems undergoing abrupt
changes in behaviour is not unique to non-equilibrium systems. It has been long
recognized in equilibrium phase transitions, too. The key to such behaviour, both
at equilibrium and away from it, is that the system loses all sense of scale. Long-
ranged correlations may develop when a system becomes scale-invariant: the
correlations exist over every range.
This is what happens in the critical phase transition of iron at its magnetic
Curie point, which is an example of a critical point. I explained in Book II
(Chapter 4) that, at a critical point, fluctuations occur on all length scales. I
showed that fluids also have critical points, where the distinction between gas
and vapour states vanishes. We saw that the distribution of gas and liquid regions
at this critical point is scale-invariant: the domains occur at all scales (Fig. 7.10).
This picture could equally well show domains in a piece of iron where the
magnetization points in one direction or the other (see Fig. 7.5). As the iron is
cooled down through its Curie point, the magnetic poles of all the atoms switch
from being randomly oriented to being aligned. But right at this point, there is no
telling which of the two orientations (shown as black or white here) will prevail.
The critical system is infinitely sensitive to fluctuations: the slightest imbalance
suffices to tip it one way or the other.
As a system like this approaches its critical point, each component feels the
influence of more and more of the others. Far from the critical point, only the
behaviour of a magnetic atom’s nearest neighbours influence its own alignment.
But as the critical point is approached, each atom’s sphere of influence (called its
correlation length) extends wider and wider. And exactly at the critical point, the
correlation length becomes ‘infinite’—which is to say, as big as the entire
system. This does not imply that the magnetic field set up by each atomic
magnet becomes stronger, or reaches out further; rather, the behaviour of the
atoms becomes more collective, so that progressively larger groups will behave
cooperatively.
Fig. 7.10: The scale-invariance of domain sizes at a critical point, such as the
Curie point of a magnet. This is a fractal structure. (Image: Alastair Bruce,
University of Edinburgh.)
 In this regard, non-equilibrium pattern formation can resemble a critical phase
transition: it relies on long-ranged correlations between components to allow
them to become organized at large scales. But there are important differences,
particularly in terms of the structures that result. For in our piece of iron, the
ordering that results as we pass through the phase transition has a characteristic
length scale that reflects the scale of interatomic forces: the magnetized iron
adopts a regular structure in which the periodicity of the magnetic alignment
occurs on the same scale as the periodicity of the atoms. We could have guessed
this length scale even above the critical point, for it is essentially the same as the
range of each atom’s magnetic influence. In non-equilibrium patterns this is not
so: the scale of ordering vastly exceeds the range of interaction of the
constituents, and there is no obvious hint of a length scale of this magnitude in
the microscopic physics of the unpatterned state. This is why we can regard such
patterns as global emergent properties of the system, which are likely to remain
hidden to a reductionistic analysis of the microscopic interactions.

POWER LAWS AND SCALING

Most of the discussion so far has been concerned with patterns that form in
systems that are essentially deterministic, which is to say that at least in principle
we can write down equations (such as the Navier–Stokes equation) that describe
the behaviour exactly. That does not by any means imply that we can solve the
equations, but it follows that, once the initial and boundary conditions (the rate
of heating, say, and the size of the container) are specified, we know what all the
ingredients of the process are.
Some of the patterns that I have talked about in these books, and particularly
in this final volume, do not share this deterministic character. The equations that
describe them contain a strong random element that is unpredictable and
impossible to formulate in anything other than statistical, average terms.
Diffusion-limited aggregation (Chapter 2) is like this: the particles become
attached to the growing DLA aggregate only after a random walk through space,
jostled by air molecules say, so that their precise trajectories are indeterminate in
advance. Noise is an essential ingredient of the patterning process in these cases,
and the forms that result look rather disorderly.
The characteristic, invariant forms of systems like this are commonly
‘hidden’—they are mathematical rather than visual. We saw in the case of sand-
pile avalanches (Book II, Chapter 4) how the apparently random sizes of slope
collapses are governed by the ‘hidden regularity’ characteristic of self-organized
criticality, distinguished by power-law statistics. And the most robust feature of
disordered fractals like DLA clusters or city shapes is their power-law scaling
behaviour or fractal dimension, which enables us to classify and compare
structures that bear no particular visible features in common. Some researchers
believe that power laws are the key to understanding much of the complex
behaviour exhibited by non-equilibrium systems that are strongly influenced by
noise. But it remains unclear to what extent self-organized criticality offers a
general framework for describing such systems. Nonetheless, it is clear that
noise, power-law behaviour, scale invariance, avalanche behaviour and fractal
forms are intimately connected in some deep way that remains to be fully
explored and unravelled.

THE ROLE OF ENTROPY PRODUCTION

No doubt this all looks like a rather piecemeal approach to the issue of pattern
selection in non-equilibrium systems. During the 1960s and 1970s, Ilya
Prigogine’s group at Brussels held out the hope of finding a more general
criterion: a ‘minimization principle’ analogous to the minimization of free
energy at equilibrium. In other words, the selected pattern in each case would be
one that minimizes some quantity. As we saw earlier, Prigogine showed that
systems only slightly out of equilibrium observed the principle of minimum
entropy production. But this principle did not seem to hold in general for
systems further from equilibrium, which is where spontaneous patterns form. It
now appears that there is probably no such minimization principle that can be
applied in general to all non-equilibrium systems. To address the problem of
pattern selection, we are forced to consider the specific details of each system. In
many cases the only option is to resort to experiment, to characterize and
categorize the taxonomy of dissipative structures that appear.
Yet there is at least one candidate for a ‘general’ principle of non-equilibrium
pattern selection that applies very widely, if not universally. It stems from work
begun in the 1950s by the American mathematical physicist Edwin Thompson
Jaynes, who attempted to reformulate the microscopic, molecular-scale
foundations of thermodynamics. In the late nineteenth century, James Clerk
Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, and others showed how the laws of
thermodynamics governing the properties of heat and matter could be
understood by considering the behaviour of individual atoms and molecules as
they jiggle and collide. This discipline became known as statistical mechanics,
since it drew on the average behaviours in the molecular melèe. Boltzmann
showed what entropy really means at this microscopic scale: it is a measure of
the different ways molecules can be arranged. In the 1940s an American
engineer named Claude Shannon showed that the concept of entropy could be
applied not just to molecules but to information: it could quantify the ways in
which units of information may be arranged. Jaynes then attempted to unite
Shannon’s ‘information theory’ with the statistical mechanics of Boltzmann and
his successors. This enabled him to start developing a kind of statistical
mechanics that applied also to non-equilibrium systems too—something that
Lars Onsager had imagined but only glimpsed.
Out of this marriage, Jaynes extracted a principle for determining ‘how things
happen’ which, he argued, applied equally to equilibrium and non-equilibrium
systems: entropy tends to get maximized. In the latter case, what this means is
that a system tends to adopt the state in which entropy is produced at the greatest
rate: that is, it does not minimize entropy production, but rather, maximizes it.
This idea has not yet gained general acceptance, but there is growing support for
it.
One of the attractive justifications of the theory of maximal entropy
production is that it offers a rationalization of why ordered patterns may appear
far from equilibrium. This, it is worth reminding ourselves once more, is a
highly counter-intuitive phenomenon: we might expect systems driven out of
equilibrium to dissolve into chaos. What is more, it appears to (although in fact
does not) challenge the second law of thermodynamics, which insists that
entropy and thus disorder must increase. And indeed, if we are now insisting that
not only does entropy increase but it tends to do so at the maximum rate, why
should that be a prescription for order rather than its opposite? The answer,
according to Jaynes’s theory of entropy maximization, is that ordered states are
more effective than disordered ones at producing entropy. To put it another way:
suppose a system has accumulated a lot of energy and ‘needs’ to discharge it. A
rather literal expression of that situation is the build-up of electrical charge in a
thundercloud, which may be released by passing electrical current to the ground.
One way this could happen is for the charge to hop out onto droplets of moisture
or dust in the air, and for these to gradually diffuse down to the ground. That is a
slow process. What often happens instead, of course, is that the charge grounds
itself all at once in a lightning bolt, creating one of the branching patterns we
encountered in this book. Lightning, the dielectric breakdown of air (page 85),
provides a ‘structured channel’ for the release of the electrical energy at the
maximal rate of entropy production. As the physicist Roderick Dewar puts it,
‘far from equilibrium, the coexistence of ordered and dissipative regions
produces and exports more entropy to the environment than a purely dissipate
soup’.* And so, according to Rod Swenson of the University of Connecticut ‘the
world can be expected to produce order whenever it gets the chance’.
The implications of this idea are extraordinary. It is one thing to explain
convective roll cells and river networks as structures that arise because they offer
‘channels’ for relieving energy stress and producing entropy efficiently. But
some researchers have gone much further than this. Harold Morowitz of George
Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and Eric Smith of the Santa Fe Institute in
New Mexico point out that life itself is an example of non-equilibrium regularity
and structure, and that perhaps it is one of Swenson’s inevitable ordered forms,
waiting to burst forth as soon as the universe gets the chance. Morowitz and
Smith argue that the early Earth was a storehouse of energy ‘needing’ to be
dissipated. In particular, there may have been plentiful hydrogen and carbon
dioxide: two molecules that release energy when they react, but which do so
only very slowly on their own. Primitive living organisms would have supplied a
way for this to happen, ‘fixing’ carbon dioxide into organic matter through
reactions that use electrons extracted from hydrogen. Similarly, some geological
environments generate molecules rich in electrons and others hungry for them;
but only living cells would let this transfer proceed at an appreciable rate. In
other words, life may have appeared on the early Earth as a kind of lightning
conductor, using order to speed up entropy production. In that picture, say
Morowitz and Smith, ‘a state of the geosphere which includes life [was] more
likely than a purely abiotic state’.

LIFE ITSELF

This is a very different view of life from the one scientists have long wrestled
with. They have tended to think that, because even the most primitive organisms
are hideously complicated, and because their ingredients seem to be rather rare
in an abiotic (inorganic) environment, life on Earth was a remarkable stroke of
luck. That, however, sits uneasily with geological evidence suggesting that life
probably began on our planet the instant this became geologically feasible—that
is, once the surface was no longer molten, and water had condensed from the
atmosphere as oceans. Moreover, the fact that life seems to thumb its nose at the
second law of thermodynamics, creating order rather than succumbing to
randomness, has long left scientists uneasy: the physicist Erwin Schrödinger felt
forced to talk in uncomfortable terms about life as a source of ‘negative
entropy’. The notion of maximum entropy production and the concomitant drive
towards non-equilibrium order potentially removes such paradoxes. It implies
that life itself is a result of the seemingly irrepressible tendency for order to
crystallize away from equilibrium.
If that is right, we have little reason to fear that we might be alone in the
universe.
 Appendix 1
The Hele-Shaw Cell

The cell is basically two clear, rigid plates separated by a small gap. It’s simplest
to make these plates in the form of trays with raised edges, which keeps the
liquid confined to the lower one. Glass is recommended, but clear plastic
(perspex/plexiglass) works fine and is easier to use. The top tray shown here
measures 27 ×27 cm, and the lower one 34 ×34cm. The perspex is 4 mm thick,
and is glued with epoxy resin.
The top plate is separated from the lower one by flat spacers at each corner—
British pennies give about the right separation, as will American nickels. The
viscous liquid is glycerine, bought from a pharmacist. For a readily visible and
attractive pattern, you can add food colouring. (Using glycerine rather than oil
makes the assembly easier to clean.) Air is injected through a small hole in the
top plate; I simply drilled a hole to fit the empty ink tube from a ball-point pen
(about 2 mm internal diameter). This was glued in place. It is simplest to inject
the air through a plastic syringe connected by rubber tubing; but you can just
blow through the tube instead. Remember that the viscous fingering pattern is a
non-equilibrium shape, which means that you need to create a substantial
disequilibrium: in plain words, blow hard and sharp!
 I have taken this design from:
T. Vicsek, ‘Construction of a radial Hele-Shaw cell’, in Random Fluctuations
and Pattern Growth, ed. H. E. Stanley and N. Ostrowsky (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic, 1988), p. 82.
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 INDEX

action, in mechanics 110, 111

activator-inhibitor systems 181, 183
Albert, Réka 162, 165, 166, 175, 176
Albertus Magnus 2
algorithms 130, 132–136
allometric scaling 138–142
Amaral, Luis 168
angiogenesis 144–146
anisotropy 20, 21
attractors 188
auxin 147, 148
Avnir, David 44
Bacon, Kevin 159
Bacon Number 159, 160
bacterial growth morphologies 50–59, 201
Ball, Robin 30, 32, 112
Banks, Joseph 70
Barabási, Albert-László 162, 163, 165, 166, 175–177
Batty, Michael 60, 62, 64–66, 69
Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction 183, 188, 198, 199
Ben-Jacob, Eshel 54–59
Bentley, William 11, 12
Bergeron, Vance 129
bifurcations 80, 187, 189–193, 198, 199
biochemical networks 150, 165, 166, 169, 170, 177
Biringuccio 28
blood, circulatory networks 134, 136–148
Bohn, Steffen 93–95, 148
Boltzmann, Ludwig 208
Brady, Robert 30, 32
Bragg, William 19
braided rivers 114–117
breakdowns, of networks 149–151, 175–178
Brockmann, Dirk 174
Brown, James 138–142
Carson, Rachel 115
Cassini, Giovanni Domenico 8, 9
chemical waves 181, 183
chemotaxis 55, 56, 144, 145
Chickering, Frances Knowlton 10
Chinese scholarship, on snowflakes 2, 3
Chopard, Bastien 38
Chu Hsi 2
citys, see urban growth clouds, fractal properties 39
coastlines 119–124
collaboration networks 160, 161
columnar cracking 70–73, 95–99
convection 179, 180, 184, 187–190, 193, 194, 197, 198, 201–204
correlated percolation model 66–69
correlations 66, 202–206
Cowan, Jim 58, 59
cracks 70–99, 148
see also fracture
craquelure 90–92
critical points and transitions 181, 192, 193, 204–206
crystal shapes 6, 7
cyberwarfare 176, 177
Czirók, András 54
Daerr, Adrian 116, 118
Darwin, Charles 127
Dawkins, Richard 100
defects 201, 202
dendritic growth 15–19
 see also mineral dendrites dense-branching morphology 19, 47, 48, 53
Descartes, René 6–8
Devil’s Postpile 96
Dewar, Roderick 209
Dezsö, Zoltán 177
dielectric breakdown model 64, 69, 85–89, 91, 107, 108
diffusion-limited aggregation 30–41, 43, 45–47, 49, 50, 52, 60, 61, 64, 65,
69, 89, 206, 207
Dimitrov, Pavel 147
dissipative structures 188, 189, 207
Dodds, Peter 172
Dyson, Freeman 195
Eden, M. 50
Eden growth 50–53
electrodeposition 15, 16, 30–32, 43, 44, 201
email networks 171, 173
Enquist, Brian 138–142
entropy 186, 208
rate of production 186, 187, 207–210
epidemiology 152, 153, 173–175, 177
Erdös, Paul 153, 155
Erdös Number 160
erosion 112–118, 121–129
Euler, Leonhard 152
Faloutsos, Michalis, Petros and Christos 163
Fingal’s Cave 70, 71
finger rafting, ice 82, 83
Finn MacCool (Fingal) 70, 71
Fleury, Vincent 46
Ford, W. W. 58
fractals 34–45, 47, 50, 62–64, 88, 89, 91, 118–125, 141–144, 180
fractal dimension 34–37, 53, 62, 63, 88, 89, 91, 106, 118, 142–144, 180
The Fractal Geometry of Nature(Mandelbrot) 39
fracture 76–80, 83–95
see also cracks
freezing 189, 190, 192
French, J. W. 96
Fujikawa, H. 51
Galileo 77
Garcia-Ruiz, Juan Manuel 44, 45
genealogies 151
geology 70–73, 84, 95–99
Ghatak, Animangsu 80, 81
Giant’s Causeway 70–73, 95–99, 201
Goehring, Lucas 96, 98, 99
Gordon, James 76, 77
Gottschalk, Johann 29
Gould, Stephen Jay 100
Glansdorff, Paul 187, 188
glass, fracture 76–80
Glauber, Johann 28
glaze, cracking 92–94
Glicksman, Martin 15, 19
graph theory 152–170
Gravner, Janko 24, 25
Griffeath, David 24, 25
Griffith, Alan Arnold 77, 78
Guare, John 160
Hack, John 104
Hack’s law of river networks 104, 109, 112
Hamilton, William 110
Hamiltonian mechanics 110
Han Ying 2
Hariot, Thomas 4, 5
Häuy, Renè Just 7
Havlin, Shlomo 66
Helbing, Dirk 178
Hele-Shaw, Henry 46
Hele-Shaw cell 46–50, 53, 211
Honda, Hisao 134–136
Hooke, Robert 8, 9
Horton, Robert E. 103, 104
Horton’s laws of river networks 103–105, 112
Hsiao T’ung 2
Hsien Tsai-hang 2
Humphreys, William J. 11, 12
Huxley, Thomas 8, 9
ice, crystal structure 19, 20
information theory 208
Inglis, Charles 77
Internet, topology 150, 163, 164, 168–170, 175, 176
invasion percolation 107–110
Ivantsov, G. P. 15, 19
Jacobs, Jane 60
Jagla, Eduardo 96, 98
Jaynes, Edwin Thompson 208
Jeong, Hawoong 162, 175, 176
Kevin Bacon Game 159, 160
Kepler, Johann 4–6, 20, 180
Kessler, David 21
Kirchner, James 105
Kleinberg, Jon 173
Koch snowflake 41–43
Königsberg bridges problem 152
Koplik, Joel 21
Lagrangian mechanics 110
Lagrange, Joseph Louis 42, 110
Landauer, Rolf 180
Langbein, Walter 105, 107
Langer, James 19, 21
Laplace, Pierre-Simon 42, 46
Laplacian instabilities 46, 50, 143, 179
leaves, vasculatory networks 144–148
Leonardo da Vinci 100–102, 118, 132, 133
Leopold, Luna 105, 107, 111, 137
Levine, Herbert 21
Libbrecht, Kenneth 22
Liben-Nowell, David 172, 173
lichen 50, 51
Lichtenberg figures 85, 86
Lichtenberg, Georg Cristoph 86
lightning 85
Longley, Paul 60, 62, 64–66
magnetism 189–191, 205, 206
Mahadevan, Lakshminarayanan 81
Makse, Hernán 66, 69
Mandelbrot, Benoit 39, 42, 119, 120
Mandelbrot set 40–42
Martens, Friedrich 10
Matthew Principle 167
Matsushita, Mitsugu 32, 51–53
Maxwell, James Clerk 208
Meakin, Paul 91
Meinhardt, Hans 148
Merton, Robert 166
metabolic rate 139, 142
Milgram, Stanley 160, 171
mineral dendrites 26–30, 36–39, 44
minimization principles 111, 112, 136–142, 186, 187, 196, 207–210
Morowitz, Harold 209, 210
Morris, Stephen 96, 98, 99
mountains, fractal 120–122
movie-star networks 158–160, 168
Müller, Gerhard 96
Müller-Khrumbhaar, Hans 19
Mullins, William 17
Mullins-Sekerka instability 17–19, 21, 46
Mumford, Lewis 60
Murray, Brad 115–117
Murray, Cecil 134–137
mutation, and bacterial growth patterns 57–59
Nakaya, Ukichiro 11, 13, 22, 25
natural selection 58
Navier-Stokes equation 194, 195
Needham, Joseph 3
Neoplatonism 101
networks 84–114, 130–178
neural networks 161
Newman, Mark 160, 161, 169, 170, 172
Newton, Isaac 27, 28
Niemeyer, Lutz 85, 86
Nittmann, Johann 22, 23
non-equilibrium growth 15, 185–189
Nuts in May (Leigh) 26
O’Carroll, Conor 98
On GrowthandForm(Thompson) 13, 142
On the Six-Cornered Snowflake (Kepler) 5, 6
Onsager, Lars 186, 187
optimal channel networks 111–114, 124, 125
rigin of life 209, 210
oscillating chemical reactions 180, 186
packing, of spheres 4, 5
Palissy, Bernard 28
Paola, Chris 115–117
Paracelsus 28
Pareto, Vilfredo 166
Pareto law 166
Pastor-Satorras, Romualdo 174
penitentes 127–129
phase transitions 181, 189–193
Pietronero, Luciano 85
Plato 1
Platonism 1, 3
power laws 34, 104, 138–142, 162, 174, 207
power networks 149–151, 161, 168, 177, 178
Prigogine, Ilya 186–188, 207
Prusinkiewicz, Przemyslaw 135–137
Pythagoras 1
Raleigh, Walter 4
random graphs 153–158, 162–164, 170
random rewiring networks 157, 158, 162
Rapaport, Anatol 152, 153, 155
Rayleigh, Lord 181, 193, 194
reaction-diffusion systems 39, 148, 179, 181, 183, 198
Rényi, Alfred 153, 155
rich-club networks 170
Richardson, Lewis Fry 120
Rinaldo, Andrea 111–114, 124
river networks 100–117
topography 118, 124–127
road networks 150, 168
Rodriguez-Iturbe, Ignacio 111–114, 124
Rojo, Alberto 96, 98
Roux, Wilhelm 132–134
Russell, Bertrand 1
Saffman, P. G. 46
Saffman-Taylor instability 46, 47
Sano, Masaki 79, 80
Sander, Len 30
Sapoval, Bernard 122–124
Sauvages, Abbé de 46
scale-free networks 162–170, 174–178
scale-invariance 41, 204
scaling law, see power law Scheuchzer, Jean-Jacques 28, 29, 45
Schreiner, Wolfgang 137, 138
Schrödinger, Erwin 210
Schumm, Stanley 104
Scoresby, William 10
searches, of networks 170–174
sedimentation 114–118
ekerka, Robert 17
self-affinity 120
self-organized criticality 207
self-similarity 41
sexual-contact networks 175
Shannon, Claude 208
Shreve, Ronald 105
silica gardens 28
Sinclair, Kevin 112
Six Degrees of Separation (Guare) 160
Skjeltorp, Arne 91, 92
small-world networks 156–178
Smith, Cyril Stanley 98
Smith, Eric 209, 210
Snow Crystals (Bentley and Humphreys) 11, 12
snow, erosion 127–129
snowflakes 1–25, 30, 31, 44, 47, 49, 182
soap films 181
social networks 151–175
Stanley, Gene 22, 23, 66
Stark, Colin 109
Strahler, Arthur 103
stream networks, see river networks street patterns 93–95
see also road networks stress concentration, in fracture 77, 78
Strogatz, Steven 156–159, 161, 167
surface tension 18, 47, 182
symmetry-breaking 184, 185, 190, 196, 197
T’ang Chin 2
Taylor, Geoffrey 46, 181, 193, 194
tearing 81
thermodynamics 185, 189–193
non-equilibrium 185–189, 207–210
Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth 13, 14, 20, 71, 74, 76, 142, 180
Thoreau, Henry David 25
Tjaden, Brett 159
topology, of networks 152, 153
transport networks 63
trees, branching patterns 130–137
Turing patterns 183, 187, 197, 198, 201, 202, 204
urban growth 59–69
urban planning 61, 62, 69
vascular networks 132–148
 Vella, Dominic 83
Vespignani, Alessandro 174
Vicsek, Tamás 54, 125
viscous fingering 44–50, 182, 211
Volta, Alessandro 86
Wasson, Glenn 159
watts, Duncan 156–159, 161, 167, 171, 172
Weaire, Denis 98
West, Geoffrey 138–142
Wettlaufer, John 83
Whymper, Edward 120
Wiesmann, Hans Jurg 85
Wilkinson, David 107
Willemsen, J. F. 107
Willis, John 79
Witten, Thomas 30
World WideWeb, topology 162, 165, 167, 168, 170
Yoffe, Elizabeth 78, 79
Yuse, Akifumi 79, 80
Zucker, Steven 147
Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders and the
publisher and author apologize for any errors or omissions. If notified, the
publisher will undertake to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.
* Kepler’s conjecture remained just that for nearly four centuries. It was proven
to be true by the American mathematician Thomas Hales in 1998.
* We will encounter this model in much more detail in the next chapter, where
we will see that it can give rise to a much more widespread and less orderly
branching pattern.
* These are not the same ‘dendrites’ as those described in rapidly freezing metals
in the previous chapter, which have a more regular, snowflake-arm appearance.
Neither, for that matter, have they anything to do with what neuroscientists
would recognize by the term, namely the branched extremities of nerve cells in
our brain. Metallurgists, geologists and biologists have all been eager to seize
upon the tree metaphor, the Greek dendron, without much regard for how the
word has been applied elsewhere.
* In three-dimensional growth a DLA cluster has a fractal dimension of about
2.5, while Brady and Ball showed that electrodeposits grown in three dimensions
have a fractal dimension of around 2.43.
* Associated with’ is a little vague. What I mean by it is the following. The
‘Mandelbrot equation’ is essentially a prescription for generating one number
(call it z2) from another (z1): the prescription is z2= z12+ c, where c is a constant.
You begin with z1= 0 and calculate z2, and then use that number as z1 and
calculate a new z2, and so on. Eventually you findthat your z2 either heads
towards infinity or it doesn’t, depending on the value you choose for c. The
Mandelbrot set is the set of all numbers c that don’t give you an infinite solution
as you keep iterating the equation. The reason the Mandelbrot set is two-
dimensional is that c has both a real and an imaginary part—real numbers lie
along the horizontal axis, imaginary ones along the vertical axis. Imaginary
numbers are multiples of the square root of minus 1, but if this is unfamiliar, it
needn’t detain us a moment longer.
* I have discussed the aesthetics of ‘fractal landscapes’ in Nature 438 (2005):
915.
* In view of Scheuchzer’s early work, and its elaboration by the Abbé de
Sauvages in 1745 (who proposed Hele-Shaw’s arrangement of a liquid injected
into a second, more viscous one), the French physicist Vincent Fleury has
proposed that this be renamed the Scheuchzer–Sauvages instability.
* Some versions of the legend find Finn’s ruse too timid, and have him leap up
and bite Benandonner’s hand, chasing him all the way back to Scotland while
hurling great lumps of earth, one of which became the Isle of Man.
* There can be little doubt that Lichtenberg and Volta had a good time together.
‘What is the simplest method to produce a good vacuum in a wineglass without
using an air pump?’, Lichtenberg asked his friend at one point. ‘Just pour in
wine! And what is then the best method to allow the air to come back? Just drink
the wine!’ He added that ‘This experiment will seldom fail!’, suggesting that he
had been careful to accumulate good statistics.
* I know of no other paper with an acknowledgement like this one: ‘I thank my
wife for her patience with my kitchen interferences.’
∗ Moreover, rivers flow in a particular direction, whereas some biologists, such
as Stephen Jay Gould, argue vigorously that there is no direction in evolution: it
branches, but is ‘going’ nowhere.
∗∗ In the real world it’s actually a little more complex than this, since rivers do
not just grow from the tips. For example, sometimes tributaries of one channel
can become captured by another, causing them to reverse the direction of their
flow.
∗ Leopold insisted only that this optimal compromise be reached at the local
scale, however—that is, for each segment of a network. He did not consider that
the balance must also be achieved throughout the whole river basin. This is
rather like saying that the network is like a collection of little ‘houses of cards’,
rather than one delicately poised big one.
∗ This might be easier to see the other way around: the body mass is directly
proportional to the body volume, which varies as the cube—the 3rd power—of
the body’s linear dimensions. So the time taken to travel at constant speed across
a cube-shaped box depends on the 1/3 power of the box’s volume.
* See http://www.oracleofbacon.org.
* Mine is 5, so far as I know, but I take heart from the fact that Erwin
Schrödinger’s is 8.
** Actually they were not all selected at random, and another group of recipients
in this study weren’t in Nebraska at all—see page 169.
* The picture is slightly complicated by the fact that there is a difference between
incoming and outgoing links. A hyperlink only takes you in one direction—you
cannot necessarily get back to your starting page from the one you end up at via
a hyperlink. But Barabási and colleagues found the same statistical pattern for
both incoming and outgoing links.
* An analysis of this structure—actually that of a subset of over 4,000 nodes of
the Internet—was conducted by the brothers Michalis, Petros and Christos
Faloutsos, all of them computer scientists, in 1999, at much the same time as
Barabási and colleagues were mapping the WWW. The Faloutsos brothers found
precisely the same kind of power-law relation for the connectivity of nodes.
* The page rank is a little more sophisticated than that, since it also takes into
account the connectedness of the pages from which the links are coming; but the
Matthew Principle still operates.
* You may recall from Book I that what is really being minimized here is a
particular quantity called the free energy, or the Gibbs energy.
* In practice we see that combination quite a lot—a layer of ice on a pond, say.
But this is because the water may not all be below freezing point, or because it
takes time for the water to freeze or the ice to melt. In those situations, the pond
isn’t in thermodynamic equilibrium.
* In reality the Earth’s magnetic field could supply a bias in favour of one
orientation. Indeed, this is how changes in the state of the geomagnetic field are
deduced from the imprint it leaves on magnetic rocks that cooled from a molten
state many millennia ago.
* That is not strictly true: there is a wealth of interesting work, for example, on
the patterns that form on spheres and other self-enclosing surfaces, such as to
ruses. Although these do not experience edge effects, the patterns are still
constrained by the overall size of the surfaces.
* ‘Dissipative’ here might be confusing in view of the discussion of ‘dissipative
structures’ earlier. Here what it implies is a process of random rather than
focused dispersal.