Erik Van Aken writes:

A slight shift in Cleopatra’s beauty, and the Roman Empire unravels. You miss your train, and an unexpected encounter changes the course of your life. A butterfly alights from a tree in Michoacán, triggering a hurricane halfway across the globe. These scenarios exemplify the essence of ‘chaos’, a term scientists coined during the middle of the 20th century, to describe how small events in complex systems can have vast, unpredictable consequences.

Beyond these anecdotes, I want to tell you the story of chaos and answer the question: ‘Can the simple flutter of a butterfly’s wings truly trigger a distant hurricane?’ To uncover the layers of this question, we must first journey into the classical world of Newtonian physics. What we uncover is fascinating – the Universe, from the grand scale of empires to the intimate moments of daily life, operates within a framework where chaos and order are not opposites but intricately connected forces.

In his bestselling book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987), James Gleick observes that 20th-century science will be remembered for three things: relativity, quantum mechanics (QM), and chaos. These theories are distinctive because they shift our understanding of classical physics toward a more complex, mysterious and unpredictable world. [Continue reading…]