{"id":7473,"date":"2019-05-22T15:57:15","date_gmt":"2019-05-22T15:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/chaos\/"},"modified":"2019-05-22T15:57:15","modified_gmt":"2019-05-22T15:57:15","slug":"chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/chaos\/","title":{"rendered":"Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Unpredictable and seemingly random behavior occurring in a non-linear system and governed by deterministic laws. &nbsp;In fact chaos, despite being incorrectly associated with randomness, is fully deterministic. &nbsp;Two hallmarks of chaos are that its behavior never cross the same path twice and that a chaotic system has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, which means that a very small initial difference can result in an enormous and unpredictable change to the future state of the system (the so-called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stsci.edu\/~lbradley\/seminar\/butterfly.html\" class=\"cc-route-enabled\" target=\"_self\" data-editable-link=\"http:\/\/www.stsci.edu\/~lbradley\/seminar\/butterfly.html&amp;target=_self\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">butterfly effect<\/a>, first described by <a href=\"ftp:\/\/texmex.mit.edu\/pub\/emanuel\/PAPERS\/Lorenz_Edward.pdf\" class=\"cc-route-enabled\" target=\"_self\" data-editable-link=\"ftp:\/\/texmex.mit.edu\/pub\/emanuel\/PAPERS\/Lorenz_Edward.pdf&amp;target=_self\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Edward N. Lorenz<\/a> in 1972). &nbsp;For this reason, it has been termed determinism without predictability. &nbsp;Chaotic attractors have fractal dimensions&nbsp;[i.e., a dimension between a line (1) and a surface (2), with a snowflake curve having a fractal dimension of 1.26]. &nbsp;Fractals are irregular shapes or surfaces produced by a process of repeated sub-division, which leads to self-similarity in structure at different levels of organisation.<\/p>\n<p>See <a href=\"attractor\">Attractor<\/a>, <a href=\"bifurcation\">Bifurcation<\/a>, <a href=\"chaos_theory\">Chaos theory<\/a>, <a href=\"complex_system\">Complex system<\/a>, <a href=\"complexity\">Complexity<\/a>, <a href=\"determinism\">Determinism<\/a>, <a href=\"dynamical_systems_approaches\">Dynamical systems approaches<\/a>, <a href=\"fractals\">Fractals<\/a>, <a href=\"levels_of_organization\">Levels of organization<\/a>, <a href=\"non-linear_dynamical_systems\">Non-linear dynamical systems<\/a>, <a href=\"non-linear_dynamics\">Non-linear dynamics<\/a>, <a href=\"self-organization\">Self-organization<\/a>, Sensitivity to initial conditions<\/p>\n<p><\/body><\/html><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unpredictable and seemingly random behavior occurring in a non-linear system and governed by deterministic laws. &nbsp;In fact chaos, despite being incorrectly associated with randomness, is fully deterministic. &nbsp;Two hallmarks of chaos are that its behavior never cross the same path twice and that a chaotic system has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, which means &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/chaos\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Chaos&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-7473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-glossary","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}