Is crazy traffic crazy?

If you drive along a typical urban street in India, you will get the impression of total chaos. Cars zip along, while pedestrians dodge their way thru traffic, bullock carts or hand carts amble along, there is the odd truck/car broken down and being repaired....could be in any lane, and two wheelers dart in and out of the flow with suicidal verve. There is no discernible adherence to lanes or traffic rules. You could see a vehicle coming in the opposite direction down a one way street in heavy traffic to avoid taking the long way around. There may even be the occasional cow, just standing there, ruminating.

Utter disorder? Chaos? Think again. It is actually a much higher level of complexity than you would find in the West, where you have obvious order because of uni-directional flow of motorised vehicles, with pretty uniform velocity, at least in each lane. People only cross when the traffic stops. No animals. In India, on the other hand, you have multi-directional flow, with a mix of motorised and animal (including humans) drawn carts, people, animals, going in many directions. And yet it works. Create these conditions in London and the traffic would stop or you would get multiple horrific accidents. Why? Because people there are trained to handle very low levels of complexity, whereas driving in India requires the ability to deal with much greater complexity. This complexity actually represents a higher level of order - multi-dimensional compared to the near uni-dimensional conditions in the West. It is a bit like going from two dimensions to three. The greater complexity of irregular three dimensional bodies is far greater than anything you can draw in two dimensions. Add a dimension, and you go from a flat plane to the whole unfathomable universe.

The point I am making is not the superiority of Indian drivers - far from it. The point is that maybe the whole concept of entropy as disorder is wrong. Maybe entropy represents the highest form of order - multidimensional, unyielding to our models. Brownian motion (like a cloud of dust in which particles of dust are moving apparently randomly, banging into each other) isnt disorder, it is just the movement of particles which are being knocked about by each other, and the position of each particle and its velocity can be determined by its history - ideally going back all the way to the big bang. Pure determinism. And, by studying all the particles in terms of size, velocity, direction elasticity and changing environmental conditions, you could predict their future course precisely, if you could create a sufficiently powerful model.

Actually, the whole concept of entropy, as being a measure of disorder, and contributing to stability of systems is totally opposed to everything which you see around you. Evolution takes you from the simple and the undifferentiated to greater complexity. And things are getting more stable, and will continue to get more stable. The conditions in the big bang were unstable. The current functioning of the universe seems far more stable, though immeasurably more complex. Our solar system has been going for a few billion years and will continue to do so for a few billion more.

So, maybe thermodynamics has got the concept of entropy all wrong. Maybe entropy is actually a measure of unfathomable complexity, not disorder.

If greater complexity were less stable, then time should actually run in reverse from a highly evolved, highly differentiated world back to the primordial undifferentiated soup of the big bang. But wait....isnt that what will happen eventually? Wont the end of time see all stars cool to a level where they collapse in, form a black hole which sucks in their planets, so that eventually there are enough black holes that will coalesce together to form one huge, unstable black hole which will explode.....the next big bang? Maybe we are going crazily up and down from one big bang to another. Up the slow curve of increasing complexity and stability, and then down the steep curve of decreasing complexity, increasing instability, things dying out, and finally collapsing into uniformity. Then, after 'pralaya', as in the vedas, the whole cycle begins again with a bang. Om shanti shanti.

But for now, entropy will continue to represent huge complexity, not disorder. And all the madness of traffic in Delhi actually represents needless, mindless complexity, not disorder.