Synchronicity

A metronome is a weighted oscillator that ticks back and forth at a constant speed. Musicians use it to help keep time when they're practicing.

If you have more than one metronome, you have to tick them exactly at the same time in order for them to match with each other. Get enough metronomes, say, 32 or so, and you will not be able to get them to synchronize exactly unless you've got some kind of mechanical metronome ticker with 32 fingers.

Or, as the video at the link shows, unless you set them on a movable surface. Apparently the moving metronome transmits its kinetic energy to the movable surface, which in turn transmits its kinetic energy back to the metronome and to all the others. Eventually, the transmitted energy finds a balance of sorts and all of the metronomes are exactly matched. You can hear the matching click noise get louder as the video progresses and more and more of them get into sync.

Now, if I were mean I would make some joke connecting the movable surface with the concept of relativism -- that there are no absolute truths -- and how that concept winds up making everybody the same, just as the movable surface erases all differences between the metronomes. It takes the immovable surface -- or maybe the idea that there is absolute truth -- to keep them all individuals. But I'm not mean.

What? Oh shucks, I guess I am.

(ETA: I may be following more in Dustbury's footsteps every day, which is not a bad place for a blog to be. Charles has his own observations on this idea, secured from another source, here.)