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FACE: Friends of Active Copyright Education
2010-06-08
The mathematical description of these reactions is analogous to those used to describe predator — prey relations involving wolves and lemmings. First, the lemmings eat grass, and their number grows. The wolves find the abundant lemmings to be a fine supply of food. The population of wolves grows and that of lemmings declines, until there are no longer enough lemmings to support the wolves. The population of wolves then declines, that of lemmings again increases, and the cycle repeats itself.
These stable oscillation patterns catch the eye and demonstrate how chemical energy can be converted to unexpectedly regular patterns, and how oscillations in time can be converted to oscillations in space. They hint at structure in life — the most spectacular processes that burn chemical energy and generate complexity. Some of the reactions occurring in simple organisms seem to oscillate, and more complex regularities exist throughout nature: the pacemaker of the heart, the trains of spikes nerve cells used to talk to the brain, the aggregation of slime molds, the patterns in the fur of animals, and the extraordinary geometrical organization that characterized the early stages in the development of the embryo.
Most of what we study in science takes place over time. It’s all about seeing change, so it makes sense to capture that change in moving images. (If we can! Many times it’s impossible.) After all, that is what animation or film is — a series of still images. But we might be missing some important observations if we only look at “moving” pictures. If we study one frame next to another, as we may here in this grid, we might get to see “more” in a way. We can compare one moment to the next and truly see more of what’s going on. See for yourself. Are you seeing the same information in both of these visual expressions of the B-Z Reaction?
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