what is chaos theory?

[omen]

can someone please explain what chaos theory is? i heard about it when i saw the movie "Pi" and it sounds kind of interesting but i can't find anyone to explain it in plain english.

[Beagle_One]

Yeah, I was wondering about that too since I watched Jurassic Park where Chaos Theory was mentioned by Dr. Malcolm. I understood it as unpredictability of the nature in general.


"A tap drips, sometimes regularly, sometimes not; the movement of a fluid is either turbulent or not; the heart beats regularly but sometimes goes into a fibrillation; the weather blows hot or cold. Wherever there is motion that appears to be chaotic—and it is all around us—there is generally little attempt to come to terms with it from a strictly scientific point of view. "

an excerpt from
http://www.marxist.com/science/chaostheory.html

[Keiichi]

Chaos theory is defined as the study of complex nonlinear dynamic systems. What chaos theory attempts to explain is the fact that complex and unpredictable results can and will occur in systems that are sensitive to their initial conditions. There are two basic principals behind it. First, that complex systems like weather have an underlying order. Second, that simple systems can produce complex behavior. One of the best examples of chaos theory in nature is the "butterfly effect", which shows that a butterfly flapping it's wings in Beijing could effect the weather just enough that, through a cycle of events, New York would get rain instead of sunshine. The butterfly's wings, by themselves, did not create rain in New York, but they were an unpredicatable variable in a much larger, more complex system.

-Keiichi