Quotes About Chaos

The Butterfly Effect was the reason. For small pieces of weather—and to a global forecaster, small can mean thunderstorms and blizzards—any prediction deteriorates rapidly. Errors and uncertainties multiply, cascading upward through a chain of turbulent features, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies that only satellites can see.

But Yorke had offered more than a mathematical result. He had sent a message to physicists: Chaos is ubiquitous; it is stable; it is structured. He also gave reason to believe that complicated systems, traditionally modeled by hard continuous differential equations, could be understood in terms of easy discrete maps.

If you could write down the solution to a differential equation," Yorke said, "then necessarily it's not chaotic, because to write it down, you must find regular invariants, things that are conserved, like angular momentum. You find enough of these things, and that lets you write down a solution. But this is exactly the way to eliminate the possibility of chaos.

To find the new x, the rule was to take the old y, add 1 and subtract 1.4 times the old x squared. To find the new y, multiply 0.3 by the old x. That is: xnew = y +1 – 1.4x2 and ynew = 0.3x. Hénon picked a starting point more or less at random, took his calculator and started plotting new points, one after another, until he had plotted thousands.

The demon replaces chance with purpose. It uses information to reduce entropy.

In the context of that debate, chaos brought an astonishing message: simple deterministic models could produce what looked like random behavior. The behavior actually had an exquisite fine structure, yet any piece of it seemed indistinguishable from noise. The discovery cut through the heart of the controversy. As May looked at more and more biological systems through the prism of simple chaotic models, he continued to see results that violated the standard intuition of practitioners.

THE ATTRACTOR OF HÉNON. A simple combination of folding and stretching produced an attractor that easy to compute yet still poorly understood by mathematicians. As thousands, the millions of points appear, more and more detail emerges. What appear to be single lines prove, on magnification, to be pairs, then pairs of pairs. Yet whether any two successive points appear nearby or far apart is unpredictable.

Information can be considered as order wrenched from disorder.

Order in chaos. It was science's oldest cliché. The idea of hidden unity and common underlying form in nature had an intrinsic appeal, and it had an unfortunate history of inspiring pseudoscientists and cranks. When Feigenbaum came to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1974, a year shy of his thirtieth birthday, he knew that if physicists were to make something of the idea now, they would need a practical framework, a way to turn ideas into calculations.

Still, to understand how the human mind sorts through the chaos of perception, surely one would need to understand how disorder can produce universality.

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next? —RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

John Hubbard, exploring iterated functions and the infinite fractal wildness of the Mandelbrot set, considered chaos a poor name for his work, because it implied randomness. To him, the overriding message was that simple processes in nature could produce magnificent edifices of complexity without randomness. In nonlinearity and feedback lay all the necessary tools for encoding and then unfolding structures as rich as the human brain.

the tiny imprecision built into each calculation rapidly takes over, because this is a system with sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes.

When a kingdom loses its king, there's always a scramble to grab.

The dead body of Gardenia was crashing around the cabin, eyes rolling in its head and mouth grinning crazily.

Life is unpredictable. You never know what will happen next. So what level of insanity am I going to have today?

His brain was simmering and bubbling within the cracking tenement of the skull.Flames burst forth from his skull like a corolla,shrieking like voices: -Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!

Ullahbluh! Sehyoh narar, pokehole sann! Manhead very dirty by am anoyato. Like old Dolldy Icon when he cooked up his iggs in bicon. He gatovit and me gotafit and Oalgoak's Cheloven gut a fudden. Povar old pitschobed! Molodeztious

Achdung! Pozor! Attenshune! Vikeroy Besights Smucky Yung Pigeschoolies. Tri Paisdinernes Eventyr Med Lochlanner Fathach I Fiounnisgehaven. Bannalanna Bangs Ballyhooly Out Of Her Buddaree Of A Bullavogue.

Yet this war has meed peace? In voina viritas. Ab chaos lex, neat wehr? — O bella! O pia! O pura! Amem. Handwalled amokst us. Thanksbeer to Balbus!

The degeneracy of a mob has no equal. It combines the mentality of the bigot, the coward, the sadist and the molester and the rapist. If there is an exception, I've yet to see it. I would love to line up a few of the participants in my sights.

The armies of the night are faceless and mindless and the modern equivalent of Visigoths, but when they have a leader, their time in history rolls around again.

and I set it on the night table. I feared for Clete. I was protected by the culture of law enforcement, one that is ferociously tribal in nature. Clete was a disgraced cop, a lone soul sowing destruction and chaos everywhere he went, and hated by the Mob and NOPD. I felt his eyes on the side of my face.