Science, which has long considered order and synchrony the exception rather than the rule in a chaotic universe, is beginning to come around. In his new book, Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, Steven Strogatz, who is professor of applied mathematics at Cornell, describes the new science.

Synchrony, says Strogatz, shows up in the most unlikely of places: from satellite orbits to whizzing electrons, from the chirping of crickets to the tendency of women who live in close quarters or who spend a lot of time together to menstruate around the same time of the month.

Order is all around us, and scientists in diverse disciplines are constantly uncovering new examples of it. But Strogatz and his colleagues make a far more extraordinary claim: Order is not just possible, it is inevitable. In 1989 Strogatz, along with Boston College mathematician Rennie Mirollo, proved mathematically that any system of 'coupled oscillators' -- that is, entities capable of responding to each other's signals, be they crickets, electrons or celestial bodies -- will spontaneously self-organize. >from *In his book Sync, Cornell's Steven Strogatz writes compelling history of a scientific revolution long in the making*. Cornell news release, march 7, 2003

related context
> another world is happening: network-based movements. march 3, 2003
> >synchronization of pulse-coupled biological oscillators. Mirollo, R.E., and Strogatz, S.H. 1990.

imago
> crickets developing order to spontaneously self-organize

There is even order in the periodic table, charting all the elements that the planet, and therefore life, is made from.

You may find this article interesting too: http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/O/origins/media/docs/originsEarth.doc 'Cave Clues to Early Life'

Hi, I loved the text, and I would like to add some comments to synchronic interactions...

First, I was thinking: Not only all the matter in the planet, but in the universe, seems made up just from a few more than hundred elements.

The ordering in the periodic table reflects the fact that there are no half atoms, nor half protons (or half neutrons or half electrons)*, so Hydrogen, the first atom has one proton, Helium, the second, has two protons, and it adds up to the heaviest elements (Lawrencium has 107 protons).** This fascinating "order" belongs to the fascinating realm of quantum mechanics.

In addition, to me, there are other kinds of order:

I like to think that: in fact, energy interacts with mater, mater interacts with energy, energy interacts with energy and mater interacts with mater. The interaction is often noisy and attenuating (through dissipation). When the number of energy and matter units interacting is large, we are not able to predict or describe the system with conventional equations, and we have plenty of complex systems at view: polymers, ceramics, glasses, magnetism, biology, cosmology, sociology, statistics, market theory...

Systems where the behavior is the result of the dynamic balance of different forces and different units... It may be like the sea, describing a wave, perfectly, it is not sufficient to understand the movement of the ensemble. And as with the waves, the 'usually' expected behavior is a disordered one, as the sea (can you imagine the sea with all the waves synchronized, it would be scaring!! :-) ).

However, sometimes the interaction is constructive. And the effect cooperative, then something amazing comes out: the crystal, the ferromagnetism, the superconductivity... We could talk about synchrony as a mathematical model: as a particular solution to an ensemble of equations, but I do not know much about that.

On the other side, there are other examples of interest about collective behavior, for example: the laser.

In a simplistic way, when the matter (of a filament) is excited, electrons jump to excited states (could be pictured as: they go further from the core) and rapidly they go back to their ground state (they come back to the place they spontaneously belong). The energy that they took to go up, they release it to get in. Emitting thus a photon.
When a bunch of atoms with a bunch of electrons jumping up and down are emitting photons, they interact between them, collide and lose energy, and get dark. However, if all the electrons could be excited and de-excited at the same time, they will all send just a wave of photons all of them together. And you apply more power and you get another wave, and another wave, and another wave... of coherent light, orders and orders of magnitude more powerful and focused than conventional light.

*you may break the proton into smaller particles, but none of them is a proton -nothing similar- anymore.
** Curiously enough, the number of protons determine the properties and the identity of the element, since species are neutral, thus there is always the same number of electrons (i.e., the number of electrons is determined by the number of protons), and a random number of neutrons, close to the number of protons, sometimes the same, sometimes not. The ratio between protons and neutrons in the core of the atom is related to the radioactivity of certain elements, but this is another story.