eli5: Doesn’t chaos theory just prove we lack all the small details/data?

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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?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Fundamental to it is the idea that for a sufficiently complex system such complete knowledge and prediction is…perhaps the best word is infeasible.

Sure, if you were an omniscient god and could know everything, ignore uncertainty, etc… Maybe you could predict it but we’re not and likely never will be. At the very least we run into the uncertainty principle but there are hordes of things we are nowhere NEAR needing to worry about that on outside of ideal lab conditions.

It would be fair to say that we can grasp and predict the outcomes of MORE complex systems as time goes on, but A) chaos theory is an arguably valid model right up until we meet that point and B) there is a theoretical cap on what we can know.

Chaos theory lives at the margins of what we can sort of predict, but escapes our total comprehension for now. The better we get, the farther out it is pushed.

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