Originally posted by Metal_Man88
That is a rather large jump to conclusion. If your theory of chaos theory was true everywhere, then you could not predict where you would step next when walking, ergo, by your logic, you would always step in the wrong spot, ergo you can never walk without the floor turning out to be the wall and then fall on your face, probably dying not long after because if you predict you are alive a few seconds later you will be dead because due to chaos theory all predictions are wrong.
No that is not what I meant because I did not give you the whole story.
Below is basic explanation of Chaos Theory:
Let's go back to the beginning. Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in
orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pen-dulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of
thing. The regular move-ment of objects. These are described by what are called linear
equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We've been doing it for
hundreds of years.
But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example,
anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an
airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described
by nonlinear equations. They're bard to solve — in fact, they're usually impossible to
solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years
ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory.
Chaos theory originally grew out of attempts to make computer models of weather in
the 1960s. Weather is a big complicated system, namely the earth's atmosphere as it
interacts with the land and the sun. The behavior of this big complicated system always
defied understanding. So naturally we couldn't predict weather. But what the early
researchers learned from computer models was that, even if you could understand it, you
still couldn't predict it. Weather prediction is absolutely impossible. The rea-son is that
the behavior of the system is sensitively dependent on initial conditions.
The shorthand is the 'butterfly effect.' A butterfly flaps its wings in Peking, and
weather in New York is different.
But if I have a weather system that I start up with a certain temperature and a certain
wind speed and a certain humidity — and if I then repeat it with almost the same
temperature, wind, and humidity — the second system will not behave almost the same.
It'll wander off and rapidly will become very different from the first. Thunderstorms
instead of sunshine. That's nonlinear dynamics. They are sensitive to initial conditions:
tiny differences become amplified.
You actually find bidden regularities within the complex variety
of a system's behavior. That's why chaos has now become a very broad theory that's used
to study everything from the stock market, to rioting crowds, to brain waves during
epilepsy. Any sort of complex system where there is confusion and unpredictability. We
can find an underlying order.
It's essentially characterized by the movement of the system within phase space,"
Chaos theory says two things. First, that complex systems like weather have an underlying order. Second, the reverse of that —
that simple systems can produce complex behavior. For example, pool balls. You hit a
pool ball, and it starts to carom off the sides of the table. In theory, that's a fairly simple
system, almost a Newtonian system. Since you can know the force imparted to the ball,
and the mass of the ball, and you can calculate the angles at which it will strike the walls,
you can predict the future behavior of the ball. In theory, you could predict the behavior
of the ball far into the future, as it keeps bouncing from side to side. You could predict
where it will end up three hours from now, in theory.
But in fact, it turns out you can't predict more than a few seconds into
the future. Because almost immediately very small effects — imperfections in the surface
of the ball, tiny indentations in the wood of the table — start to make a difference. And it
doesn't take long before they overpower your careful calculations. So it turns out that this
simple system of a pool ball on a table has unpredictable behavior.
Quoted from Jurassic Park by the late Micheal Crichton
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PYRABOARD |
It might rain this week, but I don't mind. Rain here is usually pretty light and a nice change.
