Physics with Björn: Order in Chaos

One thing I remember from my past in Physics we as graduate students is how sensitive we were to trends. If something new was found we threw everything aside and started to read everything about something new that everyone was digging into. One it was high temperature superconductivity (truly amazing) and another time it was cold fusion (or confusion). Who can have believe that there is trendiness among the nerdiest.

Or maybe were just like kids playing soccer; everybody following the ball.

Anyway, when I started out the subject a la mode was chaos theory, and I thought that this should be our little physics prompt today.

Chaos theory is really a branch of mathematics; it’s basically defined as situations where the end result or the solution is very sensitive from where you start. In reality it means that almost anything can happen in such mathematics. One famous metaphor for this is the butterfly effect.

Butterflies by M.C. Escher

What was found in the early 80s was that there are certain universal laws that you can find in most such complex solutions. Or simply put there is certain order in chaos, (at least for some short time).

There are many physical problems that you cannot solve exactly. Detailed prediction is impossible just because of it’s vast complexity. We all know that weather cannot be predicted in detail beyond a certain time.

Neither can we cannot predict the path a paper-boat will follow in a turbulent stream.

Yet we can follow in detail how a hurricane comes closer, and if we look into a stream the eddies can look quite stable, and we can guess a likely path for the paper boat.

What is common between chaotic system is that the basic physical laws are very easy. The equations are simple and well known, but due to the complexity the system can behave chaotic (unpredictable). Complexity arises in many cases for example that we have many interacting parts (the molecules in the atmosphere for instance).

In such system we can switch from one seemingly stable state to another very quickly. Eddies form and disappears, there is a tromb approaching.

In the heydays  there were even those who tried applying the universal laws of chaos to financial systems (imagine what this can do to stock markets), with the argument that stockprices are set by many individual operators acting on very simple laws (sell/buy), and we certainly have seen rapid switches when bubbles burst.

The reason that chaos theory become popular in the early 80s was the advance of computer science. Scientist could solve complex problems we never could have done before, and looking into the solutions patterns started to appear. We could find beautiful formations, fractal geometries and night in front of the computer could beat a trip on acid.

This is just a few things I could say about chaos theory, and I will leave you with a few concepts that you can use for your (new) poem:

Chaos and order, disasters and turbulence.

Weather reports or eddies in a stream.

Fractal geometry and bubble economy.

Or anything else you might think of… maybe chaos can be used as a metaphor for something else.