Re: Survival langauge

On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 23:34:45 GMT, Hedberg <hhedberg@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]
>
>I don't think that it's accurate to imply, as I believe you do, that
>science has established that chaos is an illusion resulting from a
>lack of mathematical sophistication. It may turn out that it is, and
>it may turn out that it's not, but conjecturing about it (or wishing
>about it, for that matter) makes neither possibility more likely than
>the other.
>
[...]

My understanding is that physicists and mathematicians say that a
system is "chaotic" when small changes in initial conditions --
changes that are sufficiently small to be unmeasurable -- cause large
changes in the subsequent state of the system. I believe that it's
well established that there is a physical limit to measurability and
that neither momentum nor position can be measured with infinite
precision. So, chaos does not result from lack of adequately
sophisticated math; it arises from the physical inability to make
sufficiently precise measurements. At least that's my understanding
at the moment; it's chaotic.
.

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