How Chaos Rules our Lives
The world is stranger than we can even imagine
Every day brings us new surprises. Sometimes, what we do
today decides our course of action for tomorrow. Often times,
the future brings us loads of unexpected events that we simply
don’t have control over. Nature is packed with such random and
chaotic behaviour, that we simply have no ways to predict with accuracy. Imagine a world that worked according to our wishes
and expectations. How boring our lives would be without the inherent uncertainties hidden away in nature. Our world is like
a gas chamber and we all seem to simulate the behaviour of gas
molecules in this gas chamber, undergoing constant random
motion. No one knows which two molecules will bump into each
other. Of course, unlike molecules, we humans have the liberty
to plan and execute our next action to minimize surprises. In this chaotic system, we try and bring some order.
So, where does the chaos or randomness fit into the larger
scheme of things in nature? Does the chaotic behaviour of nature
spring from its innate physical structure or is it a well-planned
design principle deliberately enforced upon us? It is hard to
imagine an alternative model to nature. Do the uncertainties
existing at the quantum level have anything to do with
unpredictability at our level?
Butterfly effect
Chaos is dealt with in math and physics as a behaviour of dynamical
systems such as a weather system or the swing of a pendulum.
The chaos theory tries to model the behaviour of such constantly
changing or evolving systems, so there is some way to predict
their future states. Hot and humid conditions in the morning may not guarantee a warm night, and a clear sky now may not
assure one of a starry night later. A small change in the initial
condition of a system may have a drastic influence on the future
state of the system. Theoretically, a butterfly flapping its wings
at someplace today, leads to the formation of a hurricane in
a week’s time somewhere else, causing untold destruction and
misery. Luckily, large and complex systems such as weather or
Ocean tides, have some seasonal patterns to help us model them
more predictably. The term Butterfly Effect was popularized by
American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz
(1917–2008), who is regarded as a pioneer of Chaos Theory.
Dynamical systems become highly sensitive to small changes
and may lead to completely unpredictable behaviour over a
period of time.
We know that stocks and commodity prices fluctuate every day
and do not show any pattern if measured over a fixed time period.
If they did, we would invest our life savings in them. Benoit
Mandelbrot (1924–2010), a French-American mathematician and
IBM Fellow, while studying the cotton price fluctuations based on
the data collected between 1900 and 1960, found an interesting price pattern. Each price change was random at short intervals, Such as a day, as was expected, but the way they changed (rate Or change), remained the same whether it was for a day or a month. If the price of cotton rose in the early trading session on a particular day, it fell slightly around noon, and fell more
statically in the late afternoon, peaking in the evening during the
user session, then this pattern of ups and downs was matched perfectly when compared to the pattern of Cotton prices over a period of a month. That is to say, the daily and monthly charts of cotton prices showed the same symmetry or trend. This was an astonishing revelation of order within a disorder. Mandelbrot, through his mathematical modelling, exposed one of the great mysteries of nature, that there was some method in the madness of the chaotic world. Mandelbrot coined the word fractal, for the behaviour of nature where a small part looks exactly like a replica of its whole.
So, what started off as chaotic behaviour, with randomness playing
havoc at the micro-level, led to a predictable and orderly pattern
at the macro level. Chaos Theory plays an important part in the
fields of economics, philosophy, microbiology, meteorology,
politics, and finance, apart from physics and math. Chaos seems
to be the character of the classical world. If on a classical level,
chaos plays such an imposing role, how is it related to the quantum
world? As it is, there is a high level of unpredictability in quantum
nature. We can see that however hard we try to measure the
position and speed of the sub-atomic particles, there is always
a large amount of approximation. The aberrations arising from
such measurements prevent us from seeing the true nature of
these particles. At what level does the chaos actually originate?
