Chaos

Author: Lürsamakin Zhang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: Slowly turn on the faucet, and you will notice the regular intervals of water drops—first increasing, then falling; it’s exactly the same. If you gently open the faucet wider, you’ll find it’s no longer single drops but double drops, with intervals increasing, and then double drops again. If you open the faucet wider, you’ll notice that the rhythm of the water drops falling becomes completely irregular. Physicist Robert Snaw and his collaborators were among the first to propose whether the dripping of a faucet is related to chaos. Chaos—a word that evokes many fantasies, yet the scientific field it represents is largely unknown to the general public. Since Newton, people have often compared the solar system to a clock, but after about one million years, it becomes unstable, and its motion becomes unpredictable. The successors of Newton, in their intoxication with the achievements of mathematical physics, believed they could accurately and completely understand the universe. Poincaré and other pioneers of chaos, however, made us much more cautious. Although chaos has helped us understand various phenomena, this book seeks readers with no mathematical knowledge, as it introduces several interesting examples to provoke philosophical reflection.