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Chaos

Deterministic chaos refers to irregular or chaotic motion that is generated by nonlinear systems evolving according to dynamical laws that uniquely determine the state of the system at all times from a knowledge of the system's previous history. It is important to point out that the chaotic behavior is due neither to external sources of noise nor to an infinite number of degrees-of-freedom nor to quantum-mechanical-like uncertainty. Instead, the source of irregularity is the exponential divergence of initially close trajectories in a bounded region of . This sensitivity to initial conditions is sometimes popularly referred to as the "butterfly effect," alluding to the idea that chaotic weather patterns can be altered by a butterfly flapping its wings. A practical implication of chaos is that its presence makes it essentially impossible to make any longterm predictions about the behavior of a dynamical system: while one can in practice only fix the initial conditions of a system to a finite accuracy, their errors increase exponentially fast.

Web Resources On Chaos

http://www.cna.org/isaac/Glossb.htm

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