he final state of the system. In a great many physical phenomena this condition is satisfied: but there are other cases in which a small initial variation may produce a great change in the final state of the system, as when the displacement of the points cause a railway train to run into another instead of keeping its proper course.” What is interesting however in the above quote is that Maxwell seems to go with the notion that in a great many cases there is no sensitivity to initial conditions.
In the 1890’s Henri Poincare was the first exponent of chaos theory. He says “it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible.” This was a far cry from the Newtonian world which sought order on how the solar system worked. Newton’s model was posted on the basis of the interaction between just two bodies. What would then happen if three bodies or N bodies were introduced into the model. This led to the rise of the Three Body Problem which led to Poincare embracing the notion that this problem could not be solved and can be tackled by approximate numerical techniques. Solving this resulted in solutions that were so tangled that is was difficult to not only draw them, it was near impossible to derive equations to fit the results. In addition, Poincare also discovered that if the three bodies started from slightly different initial positions, the orbits would trace out different paths. This led to Poincare forever being designated as the Father of Chaos Theory since he laid the groundwork on the most important element in chaos theory which is the sensitivity to initial dependence.
In the early 1960’s, the first true experimenter in chaos was a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz. He was working on a problem in weather prediction and he set up a system with twelve equations to model the weather. He set the initial conditions and the computer was left to predict what the weather might be. Upon revisiting this sequence later on, he inadvertently and by sheer accident, decided to run the sequence again in the middle and he noticed that the outcome was significantly different. The imminent question that followed was why the outcome was so different than the original. He traced this back to the initial condition wherein he noted that the initial input was different with respect to the decimal places. The system incorporated the all of the decimal places rather than the first three. (He had originally input the number .506 and he had concatenated the number from .506127). He would have expected that this thin variation in input would have created a sequence close to the original sequence but that was not to be: it was distinctly and hugely different. This effect became known as the Butterfly effect which is often substituted for Chaos Theory. Ian Stewart in his book, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, describes this visually as follows:
“The flapping of a single butterfly’s wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month’s time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian cost doesn’t happen. Or maybe one that wasn’t going to happen, does.”
Lorenz thus argued that it would be impossible to predict the weather accurately. However, he reduced his experiment to fewer set of equations and took upon observations of how small change in initial conditions affect predictability of smaller systems. He found a parallel – namely, that changes in initial conditions tends to render the final outcome of a system to be inaccurate. As he looked at alternative systems, he found a strange pattern that emerged – namely, that the system always represented a double spiral – the system never settled down to a single point but they never repeated its trajectory. It was a path breaking discovery that led to further advancement in the science of chaos in lat