How chaos forgets and remembers

摘要

The chaos revolution is now more than 50 years old. Long anticipated by mathematicians, beginning with Henri Poincare in the 1880s, the field finally emerged on the science stage in the early 1960s following the identification of chaotic behaviour in computer simulations of atmospheric and astronomical systems. Since then, many experimental observations of chaotic dynamics (such as in fluids, electric circuits, lasers and insect populations) and parallel theoretical developments have transformed the field into a fully fledged area of research. The central tenet of chaos is that simple deterministic systems - those in which the past uniquely determines the present and the present pegs down the future - can display behaviour that seems random. Writing in Physics Letters A, James and co-workers present a study that adds a layer of subtlety to this statement: they show that measurements on a deterministic system that evolves in time may contain information that is specific to its past, present and future.