TWH – A paper published last month in Nature Materials offers a striking demonstration of how large-scale order can arise from systems dominated by randomness. While popular coverage has framed the results as evidence that “chaos creates order,” the actual science is more precise—and more interesting. The study does not deal with chaos in the technical sense, but with Brownian motion, a foundational phenomenon in physics that occupies a liminal space between randomness and structure. That distinction matters, especially when scientific findings are later placed in dialogue with religious narratives of creation emerging from primordial disorder. We’ll get to that in a moment.
The article caught my attention because it echoed a dissertation topic I was once encouraged to pursue, centered on chaos theory and its broader implications. I ultimately set it aside. At the time, I simply did not have the tools to explore those questions with much precision. The new research published in Nature Materials has nothing directly to do with the work I would have been attempting, but it does suggest that the boundary between disorder and order is not merely philosophical. It is experimentally accessible.
Chaos Symbol created by Ant Allan, based on the symbol of Chaos devised by Michael Moorcock. (17 May 2007) CCA-SA 3.0 Duel licensed under GFDL and CC-BY-SA 1.0-2.5
The study centers on Brownian motion, the seemingly erratic movement of microscopic particles suspended in a fluid. First observed in 1827 by the botanist Robert Brown, the phenomenon puzzled scientists for decades. Brown could describe the jittery, ceaseless motion of pollen grains under a microscope, but he could not explain its cause. That explanation came in 1905, when Albert Einstein provided a mathematical description showing that Brownian motion arises from countless collisions with invisible atoms and molecules. Jean Perrin later confirmed Einstein’s predictions experimentally, helping to settle the long-standing debate over whether atoms truly existed. Brownian motion thus became one of the most important empirical bridges between theory and reality in modern science.
Although Brownian motion often looks chaotic to the naked eye, it is not chaos in the mathematical sense. It is stochastic, governed by probability and random interactions, rather than the deterministic but unpredictable behavior exhibited by truly chaotic systems. Still, Brownian motion sits close to the conceptual border between these two regimes, and the mathematics developed to describe it would later influence fields as diverse as economics, psychology, and meteorology. Ideas about sensitive dependence on initial conditions, now popularly associated with the “butterfly effect,” trace part of their lineage to the statistical treatment of random motion.
The new study builds on this legacy by asking a deceptively simple question: what happens when light interacts with a Brownian system? The researchers directed a linearly polarized laser into a glass container filled with nanoscale particles suspended in liquid. Because the particles move randomly and scatter light incoherently, the expectation was that the outgoing light would be unstructured and uncorrelated. Instead, the researchers observed a robust and repeatable pattern. Light scattered in one direction carried a different rotational polarization than light scattered in the opposite direction. In other words, a clear spatial organization emerged from a system dominated by random motion.
Figures a & b via Zhang et al. via Nature Materials (2025)
Crucially, this effect does not arise because the particles themselves are ordered, nor because the incoming light encodes the pattern. The correlation exists at the most elementary level: a single photon scattering off a single nanoparticle. What the Brownian environment does is not create the correlation, but preserve and amplify it. Random motion suppresses destructive interference that would otherwise wash out the signal. Over many scattering events, a subtle asymmetry becomes macroscopic and stable.
This distinction is central to understanding the result. The experiment does not show chaos generating order from nothing. Rather, it demonstrates that disorder can act as a filter, removing noise while allowing certain correlations to accumulate. Randomness, in this case, is not the enemy of structure but the condition that allows structure to persist. That insight alone has significant implications for optics and materials science, particularly for techniques that rely on extracting information from noisy environments.
What struck me, reading the paper, was how closely this scientific picture echoes one of humanity’s oldest religious ideas: creation emerging from an undifferentiated primordial state. Across cultures, myths of origin rarely begin with absolute nothingness. Instead, they describe a formless, unstable, or chaotic substrate from which order gradually arises.
Chaos Monster and Sun God. Drawing by L. Gruner – ‘Monuments of Nineveh, Second Series’ plate 5, London, J. Murray, 1853. Public domain
In ancient Mesopotamian stories, the universe begins with the mingling of primordial waters, embodied by Tiamat and Abzu, until order is established through conflict. Egyptian cosmogonies describe the dark, infinite waters of Nun, from which a primeval mound emerges and creation unfolds. In Chinese traditions, an undivided state of Wuji gives rise to differentiation as Yin and Yang. Norse stories place creation in the Ginnungagap, a yawning primordial and magical void between fire and ice, where interaction, not absence, produces the world.
Even the opening verses of Genesis describe the earth as “formless and void,” with darkness over the face of the deep, before divine action organizes light, land, and life. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Chaos is not disorder but a vast chasm, a gaping space that allows existence to come into being. The Greek word kháos refers to that opening itself.
Of course, these traditions do not anticipate modern physics, nor should they be read as scientific explanations. But they do reflect a shared intuition: that order is something that emerges, not something that appears fully formed. The Nature Materials study does not validate religious cosmologies, but it does offer a concrete example of how structure can arise in environments dominated by motion, fluctuation, and uncertainty.
Order, it seems, is not imposed upon the universe so much as discovered within its restless motion. I don’t think our ancient stories secretly encode modern physics. But it remains striking to me how often spiritual and magical intuitions echo patterns that science is only now learning how to observe. Some might even say, imprecisely but evocatively, we are witnessing order out of chaos.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.