Chaos=Order

According to a computational study conducted by a group of physicists at Washington University in St. Louis, one may create order by introducing disorder.

While working on their model – a network of interconnected pendulums, or "oscillators" – the researchers noticed that when driven by ordered forces the various pendulums behaved chaotically and swung out of sync like a group of intoxicated synchronized swimmers. This was unexpected – shouldn't synchronized forces yield synchronized pendulums?

But then came the real surprise: When they introduced disorder – forces were applied at random to each oscillator – the system became ordered and synchronized.