...chaos theory turned out to be mind-numbingly boring. Before this, my major exposure to chaos theory was Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurrasic Park, who kept arguing that, “nature finds a way.” Guess what? That’s not chaos theory.

From my readings, there seem to be two ways to discuss chaos theory. The first is the idea that many small changes in conditions can have huge consequences. It’s the butterfly effect. But instead of throwing up our hands and saying that means it’s impossible to measure things like weather, the field of chaos is dedicated to trying to understand how we can use this understanding to understand the world around us, and make better predictions about it in the future. I get it. I wish one of the books could have made it more interesting.

The second idea is fricking Mandelbrots. If I never see one of those diagrams again, it’ll be too soon.

I enjoyed the two James Gleick "sciency books for non-science types" quite a bit; Chaos in particular inspired me to write my own Mandelbrot set generator in QBasic. I didn't care so much for a different book by Ian Stewart, who wrote the "definitely for the math and science types" book on chaos theory.

Dr. Carroll seems to have only picked up on the first of what seem to me seven very interesting aspects of chaos theory:

  2.1 Sensitivity to initial conditions
  2.2 Topological mixing
  2.3 Density of periodic orbits
  2.4 Strange attractors
  2.5 Minimum complexity of a chaotic system
  2.6 Jerk systems
  2.7 Exactly-solvable chaotic systems

Even Jurassic Park the book had more chaos theory than the butterfly effect.

But Dr. Carroll is prolific and it sounds like he has been unusually busy. Too bad we will miss out on music appreciation, but linguistics and knitting should be good.

#learnnewthings schedule:

January 2016 – Water and growth in California

February – Wine

March – Game theory

April – Cryptography

May – Art history

June – The history of railroads in the U.S.

July – Oceanography

August – Football (strategy and theory)

September – Chaos theory

November – Linguistics