Weekends in Paradelle

Albert Einstein said that “God does not play dice with the universe.”

Another physicist, Joseph Ford, said  “God plays dice with the universe, but they’re loaded dice. And the main objective is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends.”

Chaos theory came from an MIT meteorologist, Edward Lorenz. He discovered that natural systems, like weather, are governed by the the “Butterfly Effect.”  This effect – the “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” -  is the essence of chaos.

(You can run this little program from CalTech that illustrates the Lorenz Attractor or Butterfly Effect. )

The idea is that something small, like the flap of a butterfly’s wings, can set off a chaotic chain reaction.

If you believe the classical Greek myths, then the creation of our world came out of chaos, is surrounded by chaos, and will end in chaos.

So, is the only certainty in life, uncertainty?

Don’t some very minor events in our lives have profound effects?

Some psych experiments have shown that you have better recall when you learn something randomly rather than in a more orderly fashion.  Other researchers have shown that your thinking becomes  most productive when your brain waves appear most chaotic.

MORE
Someone else who is sometimes credited with chaos theory is the 19th century French mathematician Henri Poincaré.

There is a film called The Butterfly Effect that connects the the flutter of a butterfly and the flutter of the human heart.  It’s not a great film, but I was attracted to it because the protagonist finds that when he reads from the journals he kept as a teen, he travels back in time. (I am a sucker for time travel.)  He gets some do-overs on parts of his past. Of course, like all time travelers, there are consequences from this in the present.  No matter how well-intentioned his actions may be, they have unintended consequences.