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The Surprising Secret of Synchronization



How does order spontaneously arise out of chaos? This video is sponsored by Kiwico — go to https://www.kiwico.com/Veritasium50 for 50% off your first month of any crate.

An enormous thanks to Prof. Steven Strogatz — this video would not have been possible without him. Much of the script-writing was inspired and informed by his wonderful book Sync, and his 2004 TED talk. He is a giant in this field, and has literally written the book on chaos, complexity, and synchronization. It was hard to find a paper in this field that Steven (or one of his students) didn’t contribute to. His Podcast “The Joy of X” is wonderful — please listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/the-joy-of-x

Nicky Case’s Amazing Firefly Interactive — https://ncase.me/fireflies

Great Kuramoto Model Interactive — https://www.complexity-explorables.org/explorables/ride-my-kuramotocycle

References:

Strogatz, S. H. (2012). Sync: How order emerges from chaos in the universe, nature, and daily life. Hachette UK. — https://ve42.co/Sync

Strogatz, S. H. (2000). From Kuramoto to Crawford: exploring the onset of synchronization in populations of coupled oscillators. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 143(1-4), 1-20. — https://ve42.co/Strogatz2000

Goldsztein, G. H., Nadeau, A. N., & Strogatz, S. H. (2021). Synchronization of clocks and metronomes: A perturbation analysis based on multiple timescales. Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, 31(2), 023109. — https://ve42.co/Goldsztein

The Broughton Suspension Bridge and the Resonance Disaster — https://ve42.co/Broughton

Bennett, M., Schatz, M. F., Rockwood, H., & Wiesenfeld, K. (2002). Huygens’s clocks. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 458(2019), 563-579. — https://ve42.co/Bennett2002

Pantaleone, J. (2002). Synchronization of metronomes. American Journal of Physics, 70(10), 992-1000. — https://ve42.co/Pantaleone2002

Kuramoto, Y. (1975). Self-entrainment of a population of coupled non-linear oscillators. In International symposium on mathematical problems in theoretical physics (pp. 420-422). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. — https://ve42.co/Kuramoto1975

Great video by Minute Earth about Tidal Locking and the Moon — https://ve42.co/MinuteEarth

Strogatz, S. H., Abrams, D. M., McRobie, A., Eckhardt, B., & Ott, E. (2005). Crowd synchrony on the Millennium Bridge. Nature, 438(7064), 43-44. — https://ve42.co/Strogatz2005

Zhabotinsky, A. M. (2007). Belousov-zhabotinsky reaction. Scholarpedia, 2(9), 1435. — https://ve42.co/Zhabotinsky2007

Flavio H Fenton et al. (2008) Cardiac arrhythmia. Scholarpedia, 3(7):1665. — https://ve42.co/Cardiac

Cherry, E. M., & Fenton, F. H. (2008). Visualization of spiral and scroll waves in simulated and experimental cardiac tissue. New Journal of Physics, 10(12), 125016. — https://ve42.co/Cherry2008

Tyson, J. J. (1994). What everyone should know about the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. In Frontiers in mathematical biology (pp. 569-587). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. — https://ve42.co/Tyson1994

Winfree, A. T. (2001). The geometry of biological time (Vol. 12). Springer Science & Business Media. — https://ve42.co/Winfree2001

The Manim Community Developers. (2021). Manim – Mathematical Animation Framework (Version v0.13.1) [Computer software]. https://www.manim.community/

Special thanks to Patreon supporters: Mac Malkawi, Oleksii Leonov, Michael Schneider, Jim Osmun, Tyson McDowell, Ludovic Robillard, jim buckmaster, fanime96, Juan Benet, Ruslan Khroma, Robert Blum, Richard Sundvall, Lee Redden, Vincent, Lyvann Ferrusca, Alfred Wallace, Arjun Chakroborty, Joar Wandborg, Clayton Greenwell, Pindex, Michael Krugman, Cy ‘kkm’ K’Nelson, Sam Lutfi, Ron Neal

Written by Derek Muller and Petr Lebedev
Animation by Fabio Albertelli and Jakub Misiek
Simulations and 3D Animation by Jonny Hyman
Filmed by Derek Muller and Raquel Nuno
Edited by Derek Muller
Additional video supplied by Getty Images
Thumbnail by Ignat Berbeci

More footage from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

100 metronome video from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suxu1bmPm2g

Intro animation by Jorge Cham

Thanks for the BZ footage from SteinbockGroup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJn1ssZEyns and
NileRed https://youtu.be/LL3kVtc-4vY

Animation of waves in the heart from The Virtual Heart/ EM Cherry/ FH Fenton — https://ve42.co/Cardiac and https://ve42.co/Cherry2008

Chemical materials and protocol provided by Mike Morris and the UCI Chemistry Outreach Program https://www.chem.uci.edu/~jsnowick/outreach/UCI_Outreach/index.html

Thanks to Alie Ward for title/thumbnail consultation
Thanks to Dr Juliette Becker and Dr James O’Donoghue for the planetary science help

Music from Jonny Hyman, Epidemic Sound https://epidemicsound.com “Seaweed” “Deeper Than The Ocean” “Ripple Effect”
Music also from Artlist https://artlist.com “Children of Mystery”

Thumbnail by Ignat Berbeci

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47 Comments

  4. So, the outside influence of order on a chaotic system tends to stabilize and increase order… This does not equal spontaneity of order. On the contrary, it does indicate order comes from order not randomness.

  5. My mom always got mad/felt like I sped up too much to pass cars on the highway but I'd noticed while in cruise-control and slowly approaching a car to pass they tended to feel your presence and if they weren't sticking to their cruise-control they'd often match speed or even try to re-overtake on the right and I told her I'd noticed that so long as I pushed it up to 10+MPH or so then it happened fast enough that they were far less likely to feel as if I were pushing them and wouldn't feel they needed to "respond" to my presence by speeding up. (understandably I've also noticed that I find "slow-passers" really aggravating/distracting and I infinitely prefer to be passed quickly rather than spend a lot of time in close proximity to any vehicles while traveling at highway speeds) — I didn't realize I'd keyed into such a fundamental constant in nature…

  7. That's why we don't understand the immune system… is being destroyed by the mandated experimental gene therapy that is safe and effective… LOL

  10. This is interesting. However, with the water freezing at the same time-example, it's not that hard to figure out why it does so, in synchronicity. As it's affected at the same time, in relative close proximity to each others atoms. The track example when you run with your friend or the fireflies is a bad example as it's made with thinking organisms. I would rather understand the law of synchronicity with inanimate objects. Understandably, the pendulum clocks hung from the same beam and the pendulums on a board with cans, would cause the vibrations from each other to be synchronized, but would the same thing occur naturally if there was no physical connection? This I'm very interested to know.

  13. Ever think about how thousands of inanimate objects and people can magically synchronize but the two girls trying to knock to “I HEAR YOUR HEART BEAT TO THE BEAT OF THE DRUMS” can’t

  19. Its not just the shifting of your pop cans… I live near a wind generating farm, the red “aircraft warning lights” all come on at dusk flashing at different intervals, by 9 or 10 o’clock they are all synced up and flashing in unison. Definitely not caused by weight displacement.

  22. When Christiaan Huygens moved the clocks apart, technically they'd still synchronize IF THE CLOCKS WERE BIG ENOUGH… For example… 1000 times the size of the Empire State Building.

  25. Great video! I noticed that there should be some logic behind resonance and synchronisation, but with your explanation I understood it right away. Thank you a lot! 👍

  27. I'm under the impression that I don't synch with many of you…I watch you drive in group cycles, shop in group cycles, run from tragedies together, and so on. I'd be curious to know how this information could benefit someone who is- for whatever reason- disconnected from the larger social construct. Aside from the obvious freedom. Any other outliers out there? Cheers all.

  31. This dude’s efforts are the best antidote to Progressivism, moral relativity, and individual or subgroup truths. Objective truth is still out there. What’s true for the goose is equally true for the gander.

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