Chaos
/ˈkeɪɒs/ – noun – complete disorder and confusion.
Chaos is widely misrepresented as something that is erratic and unpredictable, and it is anything but that.
Chaos, in the “unpredictable” sense, does not exist. In fact, chaos is predictable. We just need to know the exact information about the beginnings of a system.
Let me start from the beginning. I’m sure you must have heard about the Butterfly effect.
A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Texas, America.
That is a good way to visualize it, but that’s not what it all is. The corrected version would be that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil may cause a hurricane in Texas, America if the initial conditions are exact.
It is pretty much all about those initial conditions.
Chaos was first observed in the 1960s by a guy named Edwin Lorenz, with his graduate students Ellen Fetter & Margaret Hamilton (Margaret’s computer code took us to the moon, by the way).
Anyhow, Lorenz was looking to predict weather patterns through the simulation of atmospheric conditions through computer modeling of the governing equations. While re-running a simulation with the same initial values of all the 12 variables, he entered them up to 3 decimal places instead of the original 6. And the computer brought up a drastically different result as compared to the last time.
He thought the computer was malfunctioning…little did he know that a seemingly insignificant variance led to a complete deviation from the original results. And today, this is why we cannot predict the weather accurately for longer timespans.
Let’s turn the clock back a little now. The story of chaotic systems actually began with the French mathematician Henry Poincaré trying to win a prize.
He won the prize, offered by the King of Sweden & Norway for answering one of his can-keep-you-up-at-night thoughts: “How stable is the Solar System”?
Turns out, it is not stable. The Solar System is chaotic on a long enough timeframe.
Starting with the chaos in Pluto’s orbit. It takes 248 Earth years to orbit once around the sun and spends 20 of them in Neptune’s orbit. It is still stable, though, but that is because not much time has passed.
And when it does cross through Neptune’s orbit, their planes are not the same. Imagine that Pluto is on a piece of paper, and Neptune is on another. Now put Pluto above Neptune, such that they’re parallel but do not touch each other, this is what I mean by them not being in the same plane. There are other factors as well, such as the improbability of them coming into each other’s vicinity.
It is proposed that Jupiter also plays a role in the stabilization. The Solar System has been stable for a long time now, and it will continue to be stable. But that is not to say that it is not capable of erratic behavior…it most certainly is.
“Mercury crashing into Venus and Pluto not existing in the first place” kind of erratic.
And if you live for some more millions of years, you’d be able to witness it yourself.
There is also the case of Lagrange Points, which do represent a large change in trajectory because of a very small variance in distance…but we’ll probe through those in a separate post.
If you are still able to sleep peacefully at night, remember that Chaos exists. Never take anything for granted, for that one seemingly insignificant thing can have unchanging and drastic effects on your life.
And unlike Lorenz, you won’t be able to run the simulation again.