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Recursion, Tidy Stars, and Water Lilies

Feedback is why there are things to talk about.

I associate it (with a bit of poetic liberty) with what happens when you align two mirrors in front of each other: before, they were merely reflecting the world around them; the moment they face each other, they spawn this terrifying dark universe of infinite recursion. The man, a professor at the University of Jena in Germany, is called Ingo Althöfer, and his contribution to the field of Lego science was pouring a bucketful of them into a washing machine and pressing “Start”. Inventors and engineers were the first to clarify the concept of feedback and control loops, because it’s the only way to systematically design mechanisms capable of reaching and maintaining specific states in the face of random external forces.

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