What do I know? Chaos

Author: [French] Lюсье
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: Slowly turn on the faucet, and you will find the time intervals between drops follow a pattern—first increasing, then dripping down, exactly the same; if you gently open the faucet wider, you'll notice 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 find that the rhythm of the 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, but 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 the intoxication of mathematical physics achievements, believed they could accurately and completely understand the universe. Poincaré and other pioneers of chaos, however, made us much more cautious, even though chaos has helped us understand various phenomena. This book does not require readers to have any mathematical knowledge. It aims to provoke philosophical reflection through the interesting introduction of several examples.