Autopilot

14-billion-years-later:

An Overview of Chaos Theory

In its simplest form chaos theory is simply describes a system that is very sensitive to initial conditions. That’s not so hard is it? The term is often used in reference to the butterfly effect which postulates that something so seemingly insignificant as a butterfly flapping its wings can generate a storm on the other side of the planet. While that may be a bit of an overstatement, many real life systems, including the weather, display chaotic behavior. The effect is best seen in a double pendulum system (a pendulum attached to the end of another pendulum) which generates the image above (a long exposure image tracked with LEDS). Small changes, such as changing the angle between the two pendulums when released, would generate a gratuitous amount of widely different pathways.

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