2025.12.17

The gap between having the idea and doing the idea is where most potential dies. The almost-threshold. The nearly-fired. The thing that stayed in your head.
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Action Potential

By Andrew Henke

I've been watching these lectures by Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University who studies bioelectricity and morphogenesis. How living systems know what shape to become. How cells remember. His work is strange and beautiful.

In one of his talks, he mentioned action potential. The electrical signal that travels down a neuron when it reaches a certain threshold. Stimulus accumulates, builds, and then: spark. The neuron fires. The signal travels. Something happens.

What struck me wasn't the biology. It was the name.

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2025.12.17

The idea is deceptively simple: certain systems, when pushed far from equilibrium, don't collapse. They reorganize. They become more complex.

Chaos Theory

By Andrew Henke

I've been reading about dissipative structures—a concept that won Ilya Prigogine the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. The idea is deceptively simple: certain systems, when pushed far from equilibrium, don't collapse. They reorganize. They become more complex.

This runs counter to everything we're taught about entropy. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that disorder increases over time. Systems decay. Energy dissipates. And yet—living things exist. Organizations exist. Complexity emerges from chaos, again and again.

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