Ball - Flow: Natures 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.

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Philip Ball 2009

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First published 2009
Published in paperback 2011

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Movement creates pattern and form. Moving water arranges itself into eddies, and sometimes places these in strict array, where they become baroque and orderly conduits for unceasing flow. The motions of air and water organize the skies, the earth, and the oceans. The hidden logic of gases in turmoil paints great spinning eyes on the outer planets. Out of the collisions of particles in motion, desert dunes arise and hills become striped with sorted grains. Give these grains the ability to respond to their neighboursmake them fish, or birds, or buffalosand there seems no end to the patterns that may appear, each an extraordinary collaboration that no individual has ordained or planned.

LEONARDOS LEGACY

ORDERED FLOWS

HOW CONVECTION SHAPES THE WORLD

WHEN GRAINS GET TOGETHER

FLOCKS, SWARMS, AND CROWDS

THE TROUBLE WITH TURBULENCE

AFTER my 1999 book The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature went out of print, Id 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 Id 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

Perhaps it is not so strange after all that the man who has come to personify polyvalent virtuosity, defining the concept of the Renaissance man and becoming a symbol for the unity of all learning and creative endeavour, was something of an under-achiever. That might seem an odd label to attach to Leonardo da Vinci, but the fact is that he started very little and finished even less. His life was a succession of plans made and never realized, of commissions refused (or accepted and never honoured), of studies undertaken with such a mixture of obsessive diligence and lack of system or objective that they could offer little instruction to future generations. This was not because Leonardo was a laggard; on the contrary, his ambitions often exceeded his capacity to fulfil them.

Yet if Leonardo did not achieve as much as we feel he might have done, that did not prevent his contemporaries from recognizing his extraordinary genius. The Italian artist and writer Giorgio Vasari was prone to eulogize all his subjects in his sixteenth-century Lives of the Artists, but he seems to make a special effort for Leonardo:

In the normal course of events many men and women are born with various remarkable qualities and talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired, and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human art. Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci, an artist of outstanding physical beauty who displayed infinite grace in everything he did and who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease.

What Vasari did not wish to admit is that such an embarrassment of riches can be a burden rather than a blessing, and that it sometimes takes duller men to see a project through to its end while geniuses can only initiate them without cease. Leonardos devotion to the study of nature and science could leave his artistic patrons frustrated. Isabella dEste, marchesa of Mantua, was told by an emissary whom she dispatched to Florence to commission a portrait from the great painter, that he is working hard at geometry and is very impatient of painting In short his mathematical experiments have so estranged him from painting that he cannot bear to take up a brush.

But Leonardo was apt when the mood was upon him to labour without stint. His contemporary Matteo Bandello, a Piedmontese novelist, saw him at work on his ill-fated