Transcript

Chaos Control is not easy, as our parents know. Indeed, it's so difficult you might think it's just impossible. After all, true chaos means that even the tiniest changes can have large and in practice, unpredictable consequences, like the butterfly in China that causes a tornado in Texas. If chaotic systems are so sensitive to small perturbations, trying to correct them could just make things worse. Maybe it's easier to let little Paul throw the spaghetti at the wall and clean up later. But surprisingly, it's indeed possible to control chaos. Just exactly. What is Chaos Control? How does it work? And what can we do with it? That's what we'll talk about today.

Chaos sounds mysterious, like something anomalous, a disruption of the normal order of things. But in fact, chaos is everywhere. The solar system, for example, is chaotic. In illustrations, the solar system looks like the most orderly thing ever, but we only know it to be stable for the next few million years after that, it's possible that one or the other planet gets spontaneously derailed from its orbit. The planet that's most likely to be affected by chaos is luckily not earth, but mercury.