What is the Chaos theory?
In: Planetary Science
Imagine you take a pool table, with all 16 balls scattered at random. You hit the cue ball 10 times, identically. … well, as identically as you can. You think it’s identical.
The cue ball flies off and hits the 2 at an angle, which barely skims by the 4 and hits the 6 which goes 5cm and stops.
The second time, the cue ball hits the two at a *slightly* different angle, so after it hits the 2, it also taps the 14, and thus the 4 gets missed and so the 6 doesn’t move.
Every time you do this, you will end up with a slightly different position. So now, you shoot the cue ball again, but because all the balls were slightly different, the 4 is in a completely different place and you have to aim the cue ball in a different direction.
The third shot in each situation is *completely* different! And that just keeps getting more and more extreme.
So, you can see that the tiniest difference in input at the start completely changes the outcome of the game.
You can do this with many things. Imagine you leave your house a minute earlier than usual, which means you run into your neighbour and get invited to dinner where you meet someone who offers you a new job. Had you left a few minutes later, you might have gone out for drinks with friends instead and stayed in the same job.
There are great examples of this. I think the Beatles can be traced back to one of the members’ parents coincidentally moving to a neighbourhood, allowing the bandmates to meet 20 years later. How many kids wouldn’t have been born 9 months after a Beatles concert?
How many people’s lives were saved when they called in sick on 9/11, or when they missed their train to board the Titanic, or so many other disasters?
That’s the basic nature of it. The tiniest variable that seems to make no difference completely changes the landscape very quickly.
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