EXPLORE ELECTRONIC CHAOS

摘要

Chaos is best viewed as a form of "constrained randomness" and is all around us: bubbling cells of hot oatmeal; the colliding, rapid drips from a faucet; the unseen vortices of air tumbling off the back of your sedan; stable patches of commuter gridlock; and the movement of monetary "fluids" in distressed financial markets. Many times the governing relationships of these fluids will show domains where they can be chaotic, and fundamentally unpredictable. You can build a simple, electronically-driven pendulum that can produce automatic, perpetual chaotic motions showing no discernable regularities. Nonetheless, this device (shown in Figure 1) has some residual order - but we can't see it readily when plotted against time. In a future article, we will explore how this kind of hidden order can be found and displayed.