Never has a nursery rhyme explained a scientific theory so
well. It explains one of the basic characteristics of Chaos, i.e, a minor change at the
beginning of a process can lead to a catastrophe later on (conversely a major change in
the initial conditions could result in a minor deviation. This is called non-linearity).
Mathematician and research meteorologist Edward Lorenz made this discovery by accident
while doing weather calculations. He found out that the slightest rounding off of the
initial numbers in the weather formula would lead to entirely different results. In other
words, very tiny differences in the initial numbers would quickly lead to huge variations
in the calculations. In time, the slightest little thing could end up making a huge
difference eventually.
This is called "Extreme sensitivity to initial conditions" explained in the
above example where, for want of just a nail, the entire kingdom was lost.
The
Butterfly Effect |
 "The
wing movements of a butterfly in Peru may later through an extremely complex series of
unpredictably-linked events magnify air movements and ultimately cause a hurricane in
Texas"We
see chaos in our daily lives in traffic flow, population dynamics, organizational
behavior, shifts in public opinion, urban development and decay |
It has been found that chaos seems to underlie everything:
from the movement of atoms, flow of water, stock markets to animal behaviour. We see it in
our daily lives in traffic flow, population dynamics, organizational behavior, shifts in
public opinion, urban development and decay and the like. The science of chaos is, in its
simplest terms, the attempt to find mathematically unpredictable results in systems that
are thought to be orderly. It has been found that seemingly chaotic, lawless actions in
the outer world actually follow a hidden order.
It is a theory of complex, dynamic systems. It does not imply true chaos (random
systems), but instead refers to systems in which we find order in apparent chaos.
Chaos theory investigates a system by asking about the general character of its
long-term behavior."
Mathematician René Thom took this further and proposed the ‘catastrophe
theory’, or a mathematical description of how a chaos system bifurcates or branches
out.
When you say "the system bifurcates", it means that it is propelled either to
a new order through self-organization or to disintegration.
But, out of these bifurcations come pattern, coherence, stable dynamic structures,
networks, synchronization and synergy. It is the study of these that is giving us a better
understanding of the universe.
If we lived in a completely deterministic world there would be no surprises and no
decision making because an event would be caused by certain conditions that could lead to
no other outcome. Nor could we consider living in a completely random world for there
would be no rational way of reaching a well-reasoned decision.
Therefore we live in a world of chaos.
