wait. isn’t chaos bad?
Chaos isn’t necessarily bad, but it affects our world more than most realize. In any complex system, in which there are multiple variables, a single outcome is impossible to predict. This is chaos. At the beginning of the last century, mathematicians and physicists were revealing new questions. As theories of relativity and quantum physics developed, it became apparent that the world in which we live is not as deterministic as Newton and others believed. Henri Poincare, Benoit Mandlebrot, and Edward Lorenz all explored the nature of fractals, and revealed the presence of chaos in our universe. The Butterfly Effect, named after experiments by Lorenz, claimed that a butterfly flapping it’s wings in China could set off a series of events that could lead to a tornado in Kansas. This represents the idea that small initial changes in a system can lead to dramatic effects in the outcome. Anomalies in the patterns seem to repeat, but never exactly. This can be seen in any complex system, from the weather, to populations of species, to the spring fashion lines. Much of science today explores a world poised at the edge of chaos… Where a system seeks to retain successful information, but open to the effects of small variables.