Dr. James Yorke
University of Maryland
Scientists were probably the last people to find out about chaos.
Everyone knows our lives are all chaotic and unpredictable in the long run. The mother of a friend of mine once took a taxi, met the driver, and wound up marrying him. If she had taken a different taxi, my friend would not exist. The chaos in our lives require that our plans be flexible. The most successful people are those who are good at plan B. Ben Franklin wrote the famous lines "For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, … leading to the loss of the kingdom, all for the want of a horseshoe's nail. There is common science fiction theme of time travelers making small pivotal perturbations in the past that result in crucial changes in the present. In Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story, "A Sound of Thunder", a time traveler goes back millions of years and accidentally steps on a butterfly, significantly changing the present day world.
Chaos is an area of science and mathematics that describes situations in which small changes can cascade into larger and larger long-termeffects.
Few scientists recognized until the last 30 years that scientific environments in which precise rules govern change can be quite unpredictable in the long run. It is not the complexity of our life that causes chaos but rather its instability. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz, one of the founders of chaos theory, suggested in 1960 that the flap of a butterfly wing in Brazil might set off a tornado in Texas, implying that we can never know all the factors that determine our weather. At best we can only predict the details of the weather a few days ahead. Many scientific environments are equally unstable. Computer models have greatly helped us understand how pervasive chaos is throughout science. Our group at the University of Maryland has aimed at telling scientists how to look for varieties of chaos, for specific phenomena common to many situations. But I continue to wonder, if nearly all scientists missed this pervasive phenomenon, what else might we all be missing now?
Wednesday, January 6 at 4:00 PM
Ryan Auditorium, Technological Institute
Refreshments are served at 3:30 PM