The Secret Life of Chaos

Chaos theory has a bad name; what comes to mind first is unpredictable weather, market crashes and science gone out of control. The same theory has an entirely different face, though. This documentary is about that face: how such complicated things can come out of simple rules at all. The physicist Jim Al-Khalili narrates. The film shows with examples how complex order arises from the repetition of simple rules, and moves from there straight to the question of the origin of life. The subject is hard but the telling does not wear the viewer down with equations; everything goes through visual examples. It runs an hour and arrives at a question people have asked for thousands of years: how did we get here.