Jurassic Park

Am I really so old? Today I found myself wondering. But, let me back up a bit.

The 203 students and I had a great time in Lab today (that's the students in 203, not two hundred and three students). I gave them no instructions other than a list of available equipment, and a task to complete, and had them brainstorm a way to achieve it, and then carry it out. The task was to measure the distance to the Hyatt hotel on the other side of the river. After they all more or less figured out parallax, we went up to the roof for them to take their measurements. It was fun.

While we were waiting for the last group to come up with their procedure, a few of my students were talking about determinism. One girl was explaining how, theoretically, if you knew all the information about a system you could set it up and predict that it was going to do. And then asking "are our actions really free, or are we just being controlled by chemical reactions and physical principles, all of which can be predicted from initial conditions?" It's the old philosophical debate, really. I couldn't resist breaking in and telling them how quantum theory and the uncertainty principle leans toward disproving this theory, and how non-determinism is really the whole basis of chaos theory. I then asked "have you seen Jurassic Park?" I was rewarded with some blank stares. Then one girl said, "no... it was rated PG-13 and I wasn't 13 yet..."

Holy. cow.

To me, Jurassic Park is still a blockbuster favorite. I just assumed everyone had seen Jurassic Park. I can't believe there are people to whom that's an "old" movie. I think JP has become to this generation kind of what Jaws was to me when I was a teenager (only probably not such a legend as Jaws): a movie they have heard of and knew it was big in its day, but have never seen and don't really know much about. Crazy. Am I really so old?

Anyway, the reason I referenced Jurassic Park is because of the one scene where Ian is attempting to explain chaos theory by dripping some water on Ellie's hand. He was trying to illustrate that even with the same initial conditions, and the same system, you can end up with wildly different results. It's a crappy way to explain it, since the scale of the system in question was way too big and the initial conditions were nowhere near the same each time he tried it, (not even on the microscopic level, let alone the atomic or quantum mechanical level) but the underlying principles are true.

All in all, my students and I had a great discussion... but I still can't believe they're never seen Jurassic Park.