Random and Quasiperidoic

2005-05-29T07:53:00Z

As I noted before chaos is random; however another important part of chaos is that it is quasiperiodic. This means the state of a chaotic system, at equilibrium (a. k. a. on a strange attractor), will always eventually return to a similar state. This means that chaotic systems have themes, and these themes randomly repeat themselves. For instance, hurricanes in Florida is a theme of our chaotic weather system. The set of these themes (the strange attractor) is what we call climate.

Butterflies nudge the weather systems away from equilibrium (i.e. off the strange attractor), but soon equilibrium is restored. Thus butterflies influence when hurricanes happen, but the climate (i.e. the properties of the strange attractor) says that hurricanes in Florida will continue to happen. However suppose the weather isn’t nudged, but rather an unprecedented amount of CO2 is pumped into the atmosphere. It is possible that the weather system will be pushed so far from equilibrium that it is now pulled to a different strange attractor. This new strange attractor will have different themes than the one we are on now. Different themes means different climate. A climate whose weather can never be close to the weather we have now (otherwise it wouldn’t be a different attractor). This is what climate disruption means.

I can also see why chaotic music might be interesting. You can randomly repeat interesting themes. I guess the trick would be to set up a lovely strange attractor so that the music doesn’t sound terrible when transitioning from theme to theme.

I also now have an understanding what pfloide means when he talks about non-linear dissipative systems. I sort of always knew what it technically means; however now I understand some of the properties that these systems share and have a handful of examples in mind.

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