Please no butterfly analogies.
In: Mathematics
I try a true ELI5:
you know, when you drop a ball, it will drop on a flat floor and bounce up. If you repeat this, it does not reaaaaally depend a lot on that you do everything correct. roughly the same position and roughly the same height will give you a similar bounce.
now think about a floor that has a lot of wiggles, the ball will bounce and the direction it bounces of will depend on where it drops on the wiggles. Sometimes it will bounce high up, sometimes it will jump away. If you want to repeat a bounce, you have to be quite exact that you hit the right wiggle and at the same spot. But if wiggles are still large enough, you can do this with practice.
Some things are like this but with really fine wiggles and a very small ball. now it gets tricky to repeat a bounce and even if you try very hard, you might not be able to repeat a bounce.
We still need to understand problems like these, and Chaos theory is a way to describe problems where we can’t repeat an experiment exactly because we can’t be precise enough.
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