Snail shells are spiral, flowers are symmetric. The quest for scientific understanding of the world around us has largely been a response to the implicit questions raised by these patterns. In this sense, chaos is not another term for 'randomness'. It just looks as though it isn't. The lecture describes the origins of chaos and its implications for the present and the future, contrasting the concept with more conventional views of science.
Words are arbitrary pairings between a sound and a meaning, stored in memory.
Rules combine words into sequences in which the meaning of the sequence can be computed from the meanings of the parts and the way they are arranged. The prediction that regular forms are generated by rule whenever memory fails helps to make sense of many puzzles of language, such as where regular and irregular forms come from in the history of a language, how children learn their mother tongue, where language resides in the brain, how languages differ and what they have in common, why a batter is said to have flied out to center field, why the team in Toronto is called the Maple Leafs, and why no one really seems to know the plural of Walkman. Our entire complex cosmos emerged from a simple 'big bang'. The leading contemporary intellectual problem is consciousness. The philosophical problem is the traditional mind-body problem.