| Sensitivity to initial conditions is the bad news of chaos. |
| Any measurement of the current conditions of a system must have some uncertainty. |
| Because we cannot specify whether the system is in state S1 or in some nearby state S2, we cannot predict behavior very far into the future. |
| Note this is NOT RANDOM behavior. |
| In random behavior, knowing the current state, even exactly, we cannot predict the future with certainty. |
| In deterministic chaos, if we could know the current state exactly, then we could predict the future exactly. (This is the determinisitc part.) |
| Moreover, approximate knowledge of the present of a random system excludes few, if any, states in the immediate future, while the uncertainties of a chaotic system do not grow large immediately. |
| We shall see that chaos also contains some good news. |
Return to Introduction to Chaos.