Please no butterfly analogies.
In: Mathematics
In general, scientists are in the business of predicting what will happen to a system based on initial conditions. This could mean predicting where a rocket will go if it’s launched, or what chemical reactions will occur if things are mixed, et cetera.
Some systems are Chaotic, which means the result is wildly different depending on tiny changes to the initial conditions. Imagine putting a marble in a box and shaking it up. You could start the marble in the (almost) same position every time, and you could use a robot to shake the box the (almost) exact same way each time, but the marble is going to end up literally anywhere in the box each time and it will be very hard to predict where it will land with even the smallest bit of certainty.
It comes down to the fact that we lack the technology to do anything *exactly* the same two times (indeed, it might be literally impossible). Some systems (ones that aren’t chaotic) won’t care about tiny tiny differences and you will be able to predict them. Other systems, the ones that are chaotic, are immune to traditional methods and so a new theory was developed to try to predict them.
Chaos theory is just the name for everything we know about predicting the behavior of chaotic systems. It’s used because there are a lot of chaotic systems that matter in the world and we want to know what they will do.
An example of a practical use of chaos theory is making weather predictions.
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