Nonsensical Chaos · 10:24pm Sep 28th, 2014
It's fun to flip through a dictionary and note how words are adopted by the scientific community to serve a specific purpose, often different from the original meaning, which is then misinterpreted by the outside world, in a way which spreads further confusing, but also popularises an abstract area research, and is then further hijacked by writers as literary device to achieve some quite different objective.
Confused? That was partly the idea.
Chaos Theory is a branch of mathematics which has caught the public imagination, but is often misunderstood. It is mixed up with different concepts (such as quantum physics). As often as not, when writers mention chaos theory in a story, they are just throwing in the name, without worrying too much about what it really means, or whether it is really relevant. (Dark matter is given a similar treatment).
A chaotic system to a physicist is one which is deterministic (you know the input, you can, in theory, compute the output), but where the output is so sensitive to tiny fluctuations in the input, that in practice this becomes impossible, or very difficult.
The classic example is weather forecasting. Thanks to an international network of weather stations, satellites, and reconnaissance aircraft, we know the temperature, air pressure and other properties of the air across the North Atlantic on a given day. The science of fluid and thermo-dynamics, describing the movement of air is well understood, so surely we can calculate how those swirling highs and lows will evolve and say whether it will rain in London next week?
Not exactly. True, you can calculate how the weather will change in a short time period pretty well. But if you take that forecast as the input for the next stage, and keep iterating, it doesn't take long until the uncertainty goes sky high. The tiniest difference the data on day one, can lead to wildly different outputs seven days in the future.
Hence the famous butterfly effect: the pressure fluctuation induced by a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon, can determine whether of not it will rain on a future date in Europe.
The way modern weather forcasting works is by ensemble forecasting. Run a number of models with slight differences in the input data, and compare the resulting picture. Then we can at least answer the question 'Will it rain on Sunday?' with something like 'Ninety percent of models say no'. Not exactly what we really want. But an accurate answer.
Chaos also comes into many other areas of physics, chemistry, biology, economics and other sciences. Just to give one more example: think back to the motion of astronomical bodies described in Twilight's Sputnik. Gravity is well understood. We can calculate the motion of planets very accuracy. But while a two body system (earth+moon) is very stable. If we throw in a third body it becomes chaotic and difficult to predict. (The earth+sun+moon is actually two two-body systems as the sun is so much further away than the moon that they don't mess with each other).
The chaos, which our friend Discord is master of, is something quite different. Discord is more of an artist than a mathematician. Following the traditions of the masters of literary nonsense like Lewis Carrol and Edward Lear, as well as surrealist artists like Dalí and Magritte... Or Douglas Adam's Infinite Improbability Drive... There are many other examples. There is a different sort of mathematics and logic to this. It follows recognisable patterns, but mixes in absurd elements, to create a hilarious comedy.
A chaotic system may appear to be completely random. But it isn't, as from a given starting point, it will always evolve in the same way. Shift those starting parameters by a micron, and you have completely different behaviour.
But word 'random' is likewise used to convey an equally eclectic range of meanings, which a physicist would not always agree with. I never understood what the 'random' tag is supposed to mean (well I guess that's sort of the point). When I see it, it always makes me think it's a story written by an infinite number of monkeys.
It's cool because the Chaos theory is kind of like fake Chaos. It seems random, but really isn't.
Does this mean you're making a new fic?!
"Very Accuracy"
Nice! It's very informative!
I usually use the Random tag for collections that are going to vary wildly in tone. Most people seem to treat it as carte blanche to abandon coherence and/or characterization.
In any case, thank you for distinguishing between forms of chaos.
Very true. around here, Creatards abuse theory and fraudsters sell magical claptrap with quantum on the label. At the pharmacy, we have herbal supplements and homeopathic witchcraft next to real medicine.