the.com/chaos theory
the universe's way of saying good luck predicting anything past next tuesday.
means a branch of math showing that tiny changes in starting conditions can produce wildly different, unpredictable outcomes in complex systems.
from born in 1961 when meteorologist edward lorenz reran a weather simulation with a rounded input (0.506 instead of 0.506127) and got a wildly different forecast, revealing that small errors compound catastrophically.
the nicknamethe butterfly effect, coined from lorenz's 1972 talk title
not randomdeterministic systems, just impossible to predict long-term
fractals connectionchaotic systems often produce self-similar fractal patterns
real limitswhy weather forecasts die after about two weeks