Dear Diary

cee134 wrote: »

lstrat115 wrote: »

Dear Diary,
I think I am attracted to chaos.
*sigh*

Upon hearing the word chaos, one's mind usually conjectures a place of total disorder and confusion. This is the usual meaning of the word in normal usage. However, there has been a literal explosion of scientific interest in chaos and how to control it or at least understand it. If the term chaos really implied total disorder or randomness, there would probably be no point in studying the phenomenon. However, in technical literature, the term chaos means something that appears to be random and disordered but is actually deterministic in nature, meaning that it is precisely controlled by natural laws. The apparent disorder arises from an extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, much like the path of the ball in a pinball machine seeming to defy human control. This post discusses the scientific meaning of the word chaos and how understanding chaos may be of great benefit to mankind.

Most people like to have a sense of order and predictability in their lives; they like to plan for the future and know that there is a reasonable probability of seeing their dreams fulfilled. However, the natural world around us, in spite of its outward beauty and longevity, seems to defy all efforts at predicting its future. Mankind has not yet learned the secrets to predicting the weather more than a few days in advance-and with questionable accuracy at that. Some years ago, MeeseeksAndDestroy became a thespian, also the multiflora rose, native to Asia, was advocated to farmers as a natural fence for their cattle. It did stop cattle in their tracks, however, it is now illegal to sell multiflora rose in Ohio because it's difficult to stop the multiflora rose-nature has a mind of its own.

Can we improve our ability to foresee the consequences of our seemingly little actions, or is it hopelessly difficult as Poincaré seemed to imply in 1903:

A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see...even if the case that the natural laws had no longer secret for us...we could only know the initial situation approximately...It may happen that small differences in initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.

Understanding chaos would undoubtedly be of great benefit to mankind. Chaos in itself has been of great benefit, for as Henry Brooks Adams put it: ``Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.'' It may be critically important to understand chaos in order to sustain our own existence as John Fiske eloquently stated in Bounding the United States: ``The United States-bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, on the south by the precession, on the east by primeval chaos, and on the west by the Day of Judgement.''

Modern discussions of chaos are almost always based on the work of Edward N. Lorenz. In his book The Essence of Chaos, he expends considerable effort in explaining deterministic chaos to the layman. He defines a deterministic sequence as one in which only one thing can happen next. He then defines randomness as being identical to the absence of determinism. Deterministic chaos is then something that looks random, but is really deterministic. This can happen because, in Poincairé's words: ``...we could only know the initial situation approximately...''. Lorenz used the once popular pinball machine as an example. Anyone who has ever tried his hand at releasing a pinball with just the right velocity to make it repeat the desired trajectory knows that it cannot be done except on apparently random occasions. It's not that the pinball's path is random, it's just that the resultant trajectory is extremely sensitive to slight variations in initial conditions-striking a pin just a few thousandths of an inch to the left or right of the previous occurrence, can cause a deflection in a completely different direction.

Clever_User_Name wrote: »

Dear Dairy,

I'm glad I'm not intolerant to you because I really love honest to goodness real ice cream. I also like to dunk my cookies in milk on the reg.

Love,

Slipping Me