Hacker News Reader

> Most matter in the universe is various forms of plasma that have no pattern. You generally find patterns in condensed matter.

I don't know anything about plasma or science, so do take this as an accusation, but does science have a way to identify something of having no pattern vs having no pattern found?

View on HN

The mathematical concept is symmetry (which differs a bit from the layman’s definition).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry_(physics)

Much of the universe, and the laws of physics are symmetrical. But condensed matter exhibits forms of asymmetry, and emergent behaviour. Organisation reduces the possible microstates of a system, and thus breaks symmetry.

Off the top of my head: Kolmogorov complexity, Shannon entropy? I suppose also it depends on how faithfully or to what granularity one has extracted information from a natural phenomena

Reply on news.ycombinator.com