Epilogue

Abstract

This brings us to the end of our journey into the world of chaos. We have seen that chaos theory is one of the most exciting developments in science in the last 30 years, a development that has completely changed the way we look at nature. At one time the universe was considered to be deterministic. With enough machinery, we could follow every particle in the universe throughout its entire history. We could, in effect, calculate everything that is to be known about the universe. But this assumed that nature was linear, satisfying linear equations that were easy to solve, and scientists gradually began to realize this wasn’t the case. Much, if not most, of nature is nonlinear, and with this nonlinearity comes unpredictability and chaos. Yet, strangely, the chaos is not completely random; it has structure. Chaotic trajectories don’t wander randomly throughout space; they are confined.