chaos theory

[stoogmeister]

What is chaos theory?

[WendyW]

Its a bit too complicated to explain in a couple of lines but try http://www.brint.com/Systems.htm

[simon_says]

Very. very compicated. Basically, it states that every single thing that a person does has an effect on, not only that person's life, but on every single person on the planet, i.e a knock-on effect. e.g. If you walk down the street and notice your shoelace is undone, you could either stop to tie it or ignore it. Now, you decide to ignore it. You bump into that woman, spilling her coffee over her blouse, which in turn makes her late for work, which in turn makes her agree to stay behind at work, which in turn makes her husband unhappy, which in turn leads to a serious fall-out, etc.... Now, what would have happened if you had stopped to tie the shoelace?? That very, very basically is the chaos theory.

[gazzawazza]

In Jurassic Park it was described by Professor Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum's character) as, "A butterfly flaps it's wings in America and causes an earthquake in China."

(At least I think that that was his explanation, for America and China you could probably substitute other countries and for earthquake substitute tidal wave!)

There now, I hope that's made everything clearer for you, coz those previous answers were a little bit wooly!

[hal]

I am afraid all this stuff about butterflies wings and bumping into people sending of a train of consequences is not chaos theory. Chaos theory is a mathematical concept which actually demonstrates an underlying order in apparently chaotic systems.

[DBusby]

The concept is very simple. It is where you do something twice, absolutely the same, and get 2 different outcomes - due to small uncontrollable variables. e.g. Throwing a dart from exactly the same posistion, with exactly the same action, aiming at the same point - and getting a treble 20 and a single 20.

[j2buttonsw]

Or a 1 and a miss if you have ever watched me play darts.