I don’t understand this concept of “chaos” in a universe governed by physics.
Just because something is nearly infinitely complicated, doesn’t mean predicting outcomes would be actually impossible. If the universe produces the outcome, doesn’t that mean it’s following a rule set?
Do I fundamentally not understand chaos theory?
In: 4
I might get this slightly wrong. It is tempting to conflate complexity with chaos.
Yes, in a very complex system, outcomes will be unpredictable simply because of the amount of factors needed to predict it. This isn’t what chaos theory is about. Rather than complexity, it deals with precision.
We now understand that even fairly simple systems and even in relatively idealized settings (say a computer simulation), there are systems whose outcome over time vary by a lot even with very minute changes in inputs. This is what chaos theory is about. It adds another dimension to unpredictability.
Before chaos theory, there was the idea that given enough input, systems could be predicted long term, ie their outcomes would “converge” and predictions would be reliable and stable. In this situation, giving more precise input would only improve accuracy but not markedly affect the outcome.
An example would be given some speed, we could calculate the arrival time for a certain distance travelled. The more accurate the measure of speed, the greater the precision of the arrival time prediction – but overall we can estimate the error of our prediction based on the uncertainty of the measure of speed. This is broadly not true of chaotic systems.
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