[Revised entry by Robert Bishop on October 11, 2024.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, chaotic-hierarchy.html, definition-trouble.html, global-lyapunov-exponents.html, notes.html, quantum-chaos.html]
The big news about chaos is supposed to be that the smallest of changes in a system can result in very large differences in that system’s behavior. The so-called butterfly effect has become one of the most popular images of chaos. The idea is that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Argentina could cause a tornado in Texas three weeks later. By contrast, in an identical copy of the world sans the Argentinian butterfly, no such tornado would have occurred in Texas. The mathematical version of this property is known as sensitive…
Read the full article which is published on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (external link)
