Before starting this reading you should ask yourself: is chaos a good thing or a bad thing? From the meaning we hear in everyday life, we would say that it is something bad. But, contrary to what it seems, “chaos” does not always mean something negative. In the case of Chaos theory, we can say that this is a good thing, because this theory brings explanations of unpredictable phenomena. Therefore, Chaos Theory is a pattern of organization within a disorganized phenomenon, that is, within an apparent chance.
If we look around us, we will see different phenomena that cannot be described or predicted by mathematical laws. These unpredictable phenomena we call chaotic phenomena. A basic example of a chaotic phenomenon is the dripping of a faucet. Drawing up an equation that can describe this action is difficult, and determining how often water drops fall is also tricky.
The study of organized disorder (chaos theory) was proposed by meteorologist Edward Lorentz. He developed a computer model that simulated the evolution of weather conditions. Indicating the initial values of winds and temperatures, the computer was in charge of making a simulation of the weather forecast. In his simulations, Lorenz imagined that small changes in the initial conditions would lead to also small changes in the evolution of the picture as a whole. But what he got as a result was the opposite, small changes in the initial conditions had disproportionate effects.
Lorentz found that for short periods (one or two days) the effects produced were negligible; however, when the period was long (about a month), the effects produced totally different patterns.
Lorentz came to this conclusion after entering one of the numbers from the calculations to a few decimal places less. Hoping that a result would be reached with few changes, what happened was the opposite: this little alteration caused a great alteration of the effects produced in the air masses, which until then were its object of study.
By Domitiano Marques
Graduated in Physics