Chaos: Making a New Science

But I notice nobody is willing to listen to the consequences of the mathematics. Because they imply very large consequences for human life. Much larger than Heisenberg’s principle or Gödel’s theorem, which everybody rattles on about. Those are actually rather academic considerations. Philosophical considerations. But chaos theory concerns everyday

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Indeed, except for the very simplest physical systems, virtually everything and everybody in the world is caught up in a vast, nonlinear web of incentives and constraints and connections. The slightest change in one place causes tremors everywhere else. We can't help but disturb the universe, as T.S. Eliot almost said. The whole is almost always eq... See more

Chaos theory. You may have heard the expression: the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It comes from the title of a paper19 delivered in 1972 by MIT’s Edward Lorenz, who began his career as a meteorologist. Chaos theory applies to systems in which each of two properties hold: The systems are dynamic, meaning that

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Is the cosmic compulsion for disorder matched by an equally powerful compulsion for order, structure, and organization?