What is the Chaos theory (or the butterfly effect)?

Answer 1

Chaos theory is the study of system chaos.

This is the notion that individual events in a system are either not completely deterministic, or we do not understand the inputs well enough to predict the outputs. Therefore, "anything can happen" for an individual event, which makes the entire system unpredictable. Therefore, you step on a butterfly, which fails to pollenate a plant, which doesn't block a gust of wind, etc.

Chaos theory is the notion that you can get order out of an entire system even if individual events within it are entirely unpredictable. An order seems to emerge even though we cannot predict any individual events. For example, we have no idea whether Jim is going to buy or sell a stock today, yet some people claim to be able to study a stock chart and predict where the price of the stock is going to go (with some success, too).

A more familiar example that is not often thought of as Chaos theory is thermodynamics. We can tell exactly how long it will take a released gas to diffuse across a room, but it is impossible to predict the results of individual collisions of gas molecules in making this occur.

Answer 2

Chaos Theory

1. Order in Disorder:

The "Chaos Theory" looks at disordered systems to find the underlying order in the apparently random data.

The first true experimenter in chaos was a meteorologist, named Edward Lorenz. In 1960, he was working on the problem of weather prediction.

He searching for a pattern but he found that instead of the same pattern, the data diverged from the pattern, ending up wildly different from the original.

2. The Butterfly Effect:

This effect came to be known as the butterfly effect. The amount of difference in the starting points of the two curves is so small that it is comparable to a butterfly flapping its wings.

The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does.

3. Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions:

This phenomenon, common to chaos theory, is also known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Just a small change in the initial conditions can drastically change the long-term behavior of a system. Such a small amount of difference in a measurement might be considered experimental noise, background noise, or an inaccuracy of the equipment. Such things are impossible to avoid in even the most isolated lab. With a starting number of 2, the final result can be entirely different from the same system with a starting value of 2.000001.

From this idea, Lorenz stated that it is impossible to predict the weather accurately. However, this discovery led Lorenz on to other aspects of what eventually came to be known as chaos theory.

Read more about it ....

http://www.imho.com/grae/chaos/chaos.html

Answer 3

Hackmaster is quite wrong to attribute some evil connotation to the name "chaos" theory. The answerers who say that chaos theory predicts that causes will lead to effects are also wrong. Of course causes will lead to effects. The orbit of the moon causes the tides, but neither the orbit nor the tides are chaotic.

The best answer comes from Steve W. In a "chaotic" system, individual events are unpredictable because we don't know enough about the inputs. The slightest change in the inputs causes totally different results.

Try to throw a die "exactly" the same way twice, and get the same face up. You cannot do it. The slightest, unmeasurable change in the way you throw the die will cause a different result. That is the characteristic of a chaotic system. The die is designed to be chaotic.

Gareth, below, has what might be called "chaotic" grammar. You cannot predict any individual usage. He says "... if I hadn't OF had a computer ..." and then says "... I would not HAVE had the Internet ..." Should be "... if I hadn't HAVE had a computer ..."

Answer 4

The Chaos Theory is summed up in the statement
"Something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimatly create a typhoon halfway around the world"

Which basically means, whatever you do will have some effect (mostly adverse, hence the name Chaos Theory) somewhere else which you may or may not be aware of. For example, my typing this answer may lead to the death of someone in some faraway country.

Answer 5

The butterfly effect or the time-loop is the mathematical way to explain why things happen, e.g if I hadn't of had a computer I would not have had the Internet and I couldn't answer this question, good enough explanation?

Answer 6

The idea that everything affects everything else. The classic example:

A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil causes a tornado in Kansas.

This can obviously be applied to many different cases, but it comes from ideas concerning electrons, probability, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.