at least tangentially P-related: Class of all classes

[Monte Davis]

Mark Kohut suggests:
> ' chaos' as chance, in the largest senses, in AtD? 
> yashmeeen: a sort of "chaotic" movement of character, an open-ended
character  
>  not a character-armored one.....a personality of hope, in your
connections....? 
 
Close enough. As I've said before, the poster child in science for Mean Old
Stone-Cold Determinism has long been Laplace's speculation c. 1800 that if
we knew the mass and position and velocity of every particle in the
universe, we could use mathematical physics to run the movie forward or
backwards at will; that data would specify the whole history of the
universe. (Cf. the parallel Mean Old Stone-Cold Predestination of Calvin,
with God knowing who would be elect, who preterite, from the moment of
creation.) 
 
The Laplace version captured the confidence -- abundantly justified
confidence -- of more than a century of really amazing success in the
Newtonian enterprise. And ever since, the romantics (small and large R) have
been taking that tossed-off, "in principle" statement as The Way All
Scientists Think All the Time, Because They Have No Poetry in Their Souls or
Appreciation of Human Freedom. (In fact, I've never met such a scientist; I
suspect they're as rare as true hardcore, consistent Calvinists.)
 
Hence all the woo that has accreted around quantum theory, which seemed to
be a crack in determinism... and hence the buzz in the last few decades
around "chaos." 
 
Forget the old, formless, no-rules-at-all meaning of "chaos." Forget
"chance" or "randomess" as sloppy kinda-synonyms. To a scientist today,
"chaos" characterizes a system that *does* obey deterministic rules -- which
can be mathematically very simple, no more than the basic algebra and
calculus 101 Newton used -- but in which those rules generate very different
outcomes from two or more very similar starting points. And "very similar"
can be arbitrarily close -- giving rise to the "butterfly effect" meme: a
hurricane could form or not form today depending on a flap or not-flap weeks
ago and thousands of miles away, In non-chaotic systems, tiny variations
like that are quickly smeared out and lost in averages. In chaotic systems,
their consequences keep growing. 
 
Which plays hell with prediction, a touchstone ever since Newton's pal
Halley said "that comet in the astronomical records should be back in NN
years" and was right. Because in some chaotic systems of great interest,
such as weather, you'll *never* have initial data precise and fine-grained
enough to capture every flap or no-flap. (Any more than there was ever any
real possibility of satisfying Laplace's prerequisite.)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
      
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