What's chaos theory?
Nice to see you around though, btw, you've been pretty quiet this draft. I hope that "1 foot out the door" title under your name isn't an allusion to the ATD.
If I'm not mistaken, the theory that everything is kind of connected in a chaotic manner (specific, I know). Essentially, everything affects everything else in a sense. A butterfly flaps it's wings in Brazil and thus their is a hurricane in Florida.
Or something like that- that's about what I remember from a small presentation I saw once for it.
Not exactly. It's a deterministic system (i.e. no randomness, everything that happens in it is based on the initial conditions) where slight changes at one point cause exponentially large changes later on, making it impossible to track because our measuring instruments are never perfectly precise. So it appears random despite not being random.
For instance, if you drop a roll along a perfectly flat slope, and you know its exact size, and weight, and the friction, and the air resistance, etc. you can calculate exactly where it will be one minute later. None of those calculations will be infinitely accurate, but that doesn't matter, because if your calculation of its, say, weight is only a percent or so off, your calculation of where it will be later will only be a percent or so off, so you know where it will be within a fairly small range.
However, if you drop a ball down a surface with lots of hills and troughs at random places and tons of curves, all different degrees and shapes, it's impossible to calculate where it will be a minute later. If you calculation of the speed at which you rolled it, or its weight, or the wind resistance, is off by just 1%, that 1% difference will become exponentially larger when a hill it hits differently puts it in a totally different direction, which will make it hit another hill in a way you weren't close to expecting, and so on and so on, so that it ends up in a place completely different from where you expected.
Basically, a chaotic system is one where the effects of an inaccuracy in initial measurement (and no measurement is perfectly accurate) will grow exponentially, making it impossible to track. A non-chaotic system is where the inexactness of the initial measurements is roughly proportionate to the inexactness of the results.
The term "chaos theory" makes it sounds a lot more cosmological and philosophical than it really is, and that's why you hear about it from high schoolers trying to impress their friends all the time. It's not some kind of theory about the universe. It's a mathematical fact that it exists. The only question is what systems it applies to and which it doesn't, but that's not a major intellectual question, just a question of the physical nature of the system in question.
