Chaos

chaos theory deals with, among other things, turbulence. fractals too. i'm drawing a blank here, half-remembering an old old cold-war joke about god and one of stalin's henchmen arguing over god's existence. god said something like, »who do you think created order out of the chaos?« and stalin's henchguy shot back, »who do you think created the chaos.«

i didn't get it then, and i probably mis-told it now.

Chaos theory, you know the one where someone says a butterfly flaps its wings in China and a Hurricane happens somewhere else?
Well I'll Explain it now:
Some scientist (whose name I don't remember) was working on one of the first weather simulations. He wanted to stop it, leave, come back, and restart it. So he wrote down all of the values of all the parameters in the simulation. He came back and re-entered all of the values. The simulation acted very differently than before. At first he was confused. Then he realized that he had rounded off the numbers. The difference between the acutally number, and the numbers he used was small, so small that it was compared to the effect of a butterfly flapping its wings and changing the air pressure.
Weather, and other systems, depend very heavily on current conditions, and small differences in current conditions will grow to huge differences over time. This is one reason why you should forgive your weather man if he is wrong about next weekend.
You may think that if we could just measure the conditions exactly we could predict the weather perfectly. If you think that, you are wrong. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us that there is a limit to how exactly things can be measured. And even if we measured to the fundamental physical limit described by Heisenberg, those small errors would grow, and the weather predictions would only be accurate for a month or so.
So anyway, I basically said:
In some systems, like weather, small differences at one time grow to huge differences at a later time, and some people like to call this Chaos Theory.

The air displaced by the downward thrust of a butterfly's wings in Bejing affects the weather in New York.

I disagree with the idea of chaos being the field that underlies all things, and that it was prior to the big bang theory. I think that whole collection of ideas is an escatalogical viewpoint and very culturally biased.

Perhpas chaos is more a balance to the idea of order...both being present in any structure and necessary for existence.

Some theorists say that chaos is the ultimate fate of the Universe – I'm not so sure, I think it's a matter of time...

It has been said that systems tend toward chaos. However, abundant evidence shows systems constantly reaching upward toward order. No can look at a seed and say where the tree will have branches (chaos) , but the general shape of the mature tree will be easily recognized (order). Evolution creates higher levels of order in an attempt to become one with the original perfect order.

One definition of chaos could be that everything is more complex than some people want it to be.

Who decides what is order and what is chaos? Where does one end and the other begin, or vice versa? Would this endless puzzle matter, if only one were in the company of those (capital 'T' or not?) who knew exactly where the balance lay and never fell over the edge.....

I disagree with the idea of chaos being the field that underlies all things, and that it was prior to the big bang theory. I think that whole collection of ideas is an escatalogical viewpoint and very culturally biased.

Perhpas chaos is more a balance to the idea of order...both being present in any structure and necessary for existence.

I tell you, one must have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star. Nietzsche

»Mister Order, he runs at a very good pace, But old Mother Chaos is winning the race«
-Lord Omar Khayaam Ravenhurst, K.S.C.,
»The Book of Advice,« The Honest Book of Truth