For millions of years humanity has strived to predict the unpredictable. Ancient civilizations anticipated the changing of seasons, positions of planets, and predicted the weather. It is an innately human trait to be curious about the world and try to connect cause and effect. This has driven us to great lengths, exploring the deepest trenches of the ocean and reaching far out into the cosmos. With science and technology growing exponentially, we have more capabilities than ever before. We’ve sent humans to the moon, landed reusable rockets, and build quantum computers.
We do so much to control and predict everything around us, yet everyday we face things that cannot be controlled or predicted. We are surrounded by chaos; completely unpredictable systems that appear to be fully random, hurricanes, ocean currents, lava lamps, and even our own solar system. The universe in and of itself is chaotic, so we must accept and welcome the chaos, learn to work with it and possibly even use it to our advantage.
Chaos Theory
It is likely that you’ve heard of the butterfly effect – how a butterfly flapping its wings in China could create a chain of events leading to a hurricane in New York. The butterfly has simply set the initial conditions, and the leading events are caused by the universe unfolding itself given those initial conditions. The essence of Chaos Theory is that systems become chaotic when they are highly sensitive to initial conditions – say, if the butterfly had flapped its wings in a slightly different way, we would have gotten a tsunami in Peru rather than a hurricane in New York. In theory, if you could replicate the exact same initial condition every time, you would get the exact same outcome. You would simply apply the laws of physics to the initial conditions, then let the universe unfold itself and watch as the laws of physics play themselves out. In practice, this does not happen because chaotic systems are so sensitive to initial conditions, that being off by the size of an atom could completely change the outcome.
Predictably Unpredictable
If we know a system is chaotic, what can we possibly gain from not being able to predict it? The answer is not something that would easily come to mind: There is value in unpredictability. Believe it or not, randomness is extremely rare. If you ask a human to list out random numbers as they come to mind, this list will not be truly random because humans have internal biases and predictable thought patterns. If you give a human the numbers “0 0 0 1” they will likely say it is not random, however true randomness does not bias against repeating numbers, and is more likely to repeat numbers than any human.
Even worse, computers are not capable of randomness either. Every time you use an “online random number generator”, the numbers may seem random to you, but really the computer just follows a predictable pattern that can easily be decoded. Real randomness is incredibly scarce. If a certain numbers are used more often than others, or seem to have certain order to them, then it is predictable and no longer random.
Often hackers use this method to hack encrypted data; once they predict a pattern, the encryption becomes useless. For this reason, web security company Cloudfare uses a giant wall of lava lamps to generate encryption keys for its users. This is not just a publicity stunt – chaotic systems, lava lamps in this case, really do generate unpredictable outcomes, and this unpredictability is what makes Chaos Theory so valuable for not only encryption but also for unbiased data collection and surveys, machine learning and AI, studying random genetic mutations in DNA, and simulating human population dynamics like traffic flow.
Chaos Theory is truly beautiful, and diversely powerful across a wide range of disciplines. To demonstrate the beauty of chaos, I have set up a some double pendulums in a dark room and photographed their motion with long exposure, to show the beautifully random patterns that emerge. I hope you enjoy this fascinating display of chaos!
