Jurassic park - Movie Review Example

1 As Francis Heylighen says, " an attractor is a region of a dynamical system's space that the system can enter but not leave, and which contains no smaller such region"(1). You throw out a pebble onto the floor and it reaches a certain point and fixes there. Throwing out a pebble here is the dynamic system and the spot where the pebble landed is called the attractor. That the pebble is in a state of equilibrium speaks of the system's end result. As the system ends up at the fixed point, the attractor here is known as the point attractor.

This dynamic principle can be compared to human characters whose minds evolve towards certain preconceived fixed notions/ ideas.The character of Ian Malcolm in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park stands as the best example for the point attractor. Malcolm, described as a learned mathematician at the University of Texas in Austin, clearly warns the Hammond Foundation representatives of the impending dangers of resort venture in the Costa Rica. Always attired in black and gray, giving the look of a mourner, Malcolm heavily speaks of the chaos theory which says that even simple systems exhibit unpredictable behavior.

He repeatedly stresses that some kind of unpredictable behavior is going to manifest on the island. Malcolm refutes the 'all well' theory of Hammond, the chief of Hammond Foundation, Henry Wu, the geneticist who boasts of his ability to control the cloned dinosaurs and John Arnold, the engineering brain behind the Jurassic park. 2Like a point attractor, Malcolm's mind is fixed and in a state of equilibrium that can not be changed.

He asserts that the park will end in disaster. On several occasions, Hammond and others argue with him and try to change his state of mind but that is of no use. Malcolm does not budge an inch in his mind-set. Like a pebble dropped on to a spot on the floor, his mind points to the chaotic happenings that are going to unfold and that is his end thinking in relation to Jurassic park. It doesn't seem to be an exaggeration to opine that the writer created this character to illustrate the dynamics of the point attractor.

Hammond group's efforts to change the mind of Malcolm don't bear fruit. Their intention to convince him into believing that everything is alright at the Jurassic Park, the home for the cloned dinosaurs, can be compared to bifurcate and create another attracter. In contrast, the character of Hammond can be a dynamic example for the strange attractors. When an attractor inherently involves chaotic propositions, it turns into a strange one .The mind of Hammond always centers around making some twenty billion dollars a year by throwing open the park to children.

He always craves for the early completion of the park and is in no mood to be convinced about the inability of the computers and technology to control the herd of dinosaurs born in a laboratory. 3Works cited:1.Heylighen, Francis. < fheyligh@vub.ac.be > "Attractors". Principia Cybernetica Web. 14 Oct. 1998. .