Deterministic Chaos Overview

Deterministic Chaos - Overview

Isaac Newton used the mechanics that he developed
to calculate the orbit of the earth around the sun,
but could not find a method to predict the path
of a planet orbiting two adjacent stars. The reason:
the orbit is deterministically chaotic, not fixed. This
animation shows the path taken by the planet.
The orbit is now modelled using iterative calculations
done by a computer.

Why can't weather be accurately predicted? The National Meteorological Center, which works with vast amounts of data crunched through over 500,000 equations, can't predict exactly what the weather will do.

The reason why it can't was demonstrated in the 1960s by a mathematician turned meteorologist, Edward Lorenz. At the time of his discovery, most scientists believed that a slight perturbation in a system was self-healing; i.e., that the perturbation would be "smoothed over" and that the system would continue to behave as though no perturbation had occurred. Lorenz showed that even a very small perturbation can cause a large difference in outcomes. He called this phenomenon the butterfly effect, after the idea that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas.

The butterfly effect is the basis of deterministic chaos--deterministic because the rules governing behavior of the system are well-defined, chaotic because even a very small difference in the starting point can lead to very different results.