----- Original Message ----- From: "Matt Cramer" <cramer at unix01.voicenet.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 8:31 PM Subject: Re: Why we will need lawyers anyway
> Luke, that's not chaos theory. Chaos theory is concerned with looking
> quantitatively and deterministically at nonlinear systems that display
> extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. So actually chaos theory
> *allows* us to calculate results of what otherwise might have been
> impossible problems, using things like self-similarity and attractors.
>
> I think the concept of attractors was discussed on this list some time
> last year, and I gave a short little intro to the concept of attractors in
> chaos theory.
>
> Chaos theory is most popularly misconceptualized like this - that it has
> been proven that some things are unpredictable.
What, then, are the complex multi-variable systems that have eluded prediction designated as? There must be a term for why we can't predict what the weather will be like in a year's time.
-- Luke