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Chaos

 

In Greek cosmology, either the primeval emptiness before things came into being or the abyss of Tartarus, the underworld. In Hesiod's Theogony, there was first Chaos, then Gaea and Eros. The offspring of Chaos were Erebus (Darkness) and Nyx (Night). Ovid gave Chaos its modern meaning: the original formless and disordered mass from which the ordered universe is created. The early church fathers applied this interpretation to the creation story in Genesis.

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Chaos ('ōs), in Greek religion and mythology, vacant, unfathomable space. From it arose all things, earthly and divine. There are various legends explaining it. In one version, Eurynome rose out of Chaos and created all things. In another, Gaea sprang from Chaos and was the mother of all things. Eventually the word chaos came to mean a great confusion of matter out of which a supreme being created all life.


Quotes About: Chaos
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Quotes:

"Pandemonium did not reign; it poured." - John Hendrick Bangs

"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now." - Samuel Beckett

"Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions comes a people." - Lord Byron

"We live in a rainbow of chaos." - Paul Cezanne

"In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will." - Jose Ortega Y Gasset

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." - Carl Jung

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Wikipedia: Chaos
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Chaos (derived from the Ancient Greek Χάος, Chaos) typically means a state lacking order or predictability. In ancient Greece, it meant the initial state of the universe, and, by extension, space, darkness, or an abyss[1] (the antithetical concept was cosmos). In modern English, it is used in classical studies with this original meaning; in mathematics and science to refer to a very specific kind of unpredictability; and informally to mean a state of confusion.[2] In popular culture, the word can occur with all three meanings.

Chaos in mythology, literature, and religion

In Greek myth, Chaos is the original dark void from which everything else appeared. According to Hesiod's Theogony (the origin of the gods), Chaos was the nothingness out of which the first objects of existence appeared. In a similar way, the book of Genesis in the Bible refers to the earliest conditions of the Earth as "without form, and void",[3] while Ovid's Metamorphoses describes the initial state of the Universe as a disorganised mixture of the four elements:

Rather a rude and indigested mass:
A lifeless lump, unfashion'd, and unfram'd,
Of jarring seeds; and justly Chaos nam'd.
No sun was lighted up, the world to view;
No moon did yet her blunted horns renew:
Nor yet was Earth suspended in the sky,
Nor pois'd, did on her own foundations lye:
Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown;
But earth, and air, and water, were in one.
Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable,
And water's dark abyss unnavigable.[4]

Scientific and mathematical chaos

Mathematically, chaos means deterministic behaviour which is very sensitive to its initial conditions.[5] In other words, infinitesimal perturbations of initial conditions for a chaotic dynamic system lead to large variations in behaviour.

Chaotic systems consequently look random. However, they are actually deterministic systems governed by physical or mathematical laws (predictable in principle, if you have exact information) that are impossible to predict in practice beyond a certain point.[6] A commonly used example is weather forecasting, which is only possible up to about a week ahead.[7]

Edward Lorenz and Henri Poincaré were early pioneers of chaos theory, and James Gleick's 1987 book Chaos: Making a New Science helped to popularize the field. A number of philosophers have used the existence of chaos in this sense in arguments about free will.

More recently, computer scientist Christopher Langton in 1990 coined the phrase "edge of chaos" to refer to the behaviour of certain classes of cellular automata.[8] The phrase has since come to refer to a metaphor that some physical, biological, economic, and social systems operate in a region where complexity is maximal, balanced between order, on the one hand, and randomness or chaos, on the other.

Notes

  1. ^ Henry Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, online at the Perseus Project, 2007.
  2. ^ Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, accessed 4 April 2009.
  3. ^ The Holy Bible, King James Version, online.
  4. ^ Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1, online
  5. ^ Saber N. Elaydi, Discrete Chaos, Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1999, page 117.
  6. ^ Werndl, Charlotte (2009). What are the New Implications of Chaos for Unpredictability?. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60, 195-220.
  7. ^ Robert G. Watts, Global Warming and the Future of the Earth, Morgan & Claypool, 2007, page 17.
  8. ^ Christopher G. Langton. "Computation at the edge of chaos". Physica D, 42, 1990.

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New Words
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Greek Mythology
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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
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