‘Evolutionary Process from Chaos to Order’

Like Atkinson, who makes a case for order (along with disorder) in nature’s many systems, the ancient Greeks were not put out by narrow interpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And like him, too, they believed that “A star is much more ordered than the hydrogen cloud from which it formed.”

It was the Greek’s cloven-hoofed Pan who portrayed for them the ambivalence of order and disorder, as Robert Louis Stevenson tells us in his tribute to the capricious demigod. Stevenson says, “The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly stamping his foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by the woodside on a summer noon trilling on his pipe until he charmed the hearts of upland plowmen. And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the last word of human experience.” As out of a body pained came these so-painless words.

And out of the order of a disordered four score and four, I can add nothing to a poet’s thoughts or a professor’s faith, but I can say that life has been an experience I wouldn’t have missed for anything. Thank you, Professor Atkinson and Robert Louis Stevenson.

WM. L. MOORE

Hemet