![]() That research turned up something strange. His work involved using computers to predict weather patterns. At the time, he was a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Mathematician Edward Lorenz developed modern chaos theory in the 1960s. In fact, weather is the poster child of chaotic systems. So, it’s hard to look at a chaotic system at any given time and know exactly what its initial conditions were.įor example, have you ever wondered why predictions of the weather one to three days from now can be horribly wrong? Blame chaos. But even tiny changes to those conditions can lead to huge changes later. If you know these starting conditions, you can predict how fast and far the ball will roll.Ī chaotic system is similarly sensitive to its initial conditions. Here, the ball’s mass and the hill’s height and angle of decline are the starting conditions. A ball rolling down a hill is one example. In a non-chaotic system, it’s easy to measure the details of the starting environment. There’s a whole area of science devoted to this. It refers to a system that is not totally random but still cannot be easily predicted. But to scientists, chaos means something else. ![]() The energetic behavior of kids on a bus ride home from a field trip might be one example. It’s common to hear the term chaos used to describe seemingly random, unpredictable events.
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