Physics time! Wow;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2E5oojoXjk
Chaotic pendulums all the way! How good would it look to have a smaller one of these on my desk. Well I am rather tempted! A chaotic pendulum, for instance, the Double pendulum, exhibits completely irregular swings that even after averaging out over a long period of time cannot be predicted. There is just no rationality to it. Watch the above video all the way through to see a very short example of such. The triple pendulum exhibits more unpredictability but tends to exhibit smoother motion (the 2 free arms tend to end up more in-sync with each other).
"Mathematically, chaos refers to a very specific kind of unpredictability: deterministic behaviour that is very sensitive to its initial conditions.[9] In other words, infinitesimal variations in initial conditions for a chaotic dynamic system lead to large variations in behaviour.
Chaotic systems consequently appear disordered and random. However, they are actually deterministic systems governed by physical or mathematical laws, and so are completely predictable given perfect knowledge of the initial conditions. In other words, a chaotic system will always exhibit the same behaviour when seeded with the same initial conditions - there is no inherent randomness in this regard.[10] However, such perfect knowledge is never attainable in real life; slight errors are intrinsic to any physical measurement. In a chaotic system, these slight errors will give rise to results which differ wildly from the correct result. A commonly used example is weather forecasting, which is only possible up to about a week ahead,[11] despite theoretically being perfectly possible at any level (ignoring the effects of the uncertainty principle)."
A good item from Wikipedia, an amazing book to read is James Gleicks: Chaos. Which covers every aspect of Chaos theorem and does a very good job at trying to explain it!
Over and Out
Simon( Giantsitel )
No comments:
Post a Comment