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Chaos

 
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.


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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

See more famous quotes about 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, philosophy, literature, and religion

In Greek mythical cosmogony, particularly in the Theogony (Origin of the Gods) of Hesiod (8th–7th century BC), Chaos is the original dark void from which everything else appeared. First came Earth and Eros (Love), then Erebus and his sister Nyx (Night). These siblings produced children together which included Aether, Hemera (Day), and Nemesis.[3] Other cosmogonies, such as the lost Heptamychos of Pherecydes of Syros, also have the gods being born from Chaos, but in a different way.

Hesiod's cosmogony may have influenced the 6th century BC philosopher Anaximander,[4] although this is debated.[5] Anaximander taught that that the indefinite or apeiron was the source of all things.[6] Some ideas similar to those of Hesiod also appear in the Hiranyagarbha of Vedic cosmogony, and in the Babylonian Enûma Eliš.[7] The book of Genesis in the Bible refers to the earliest conditions of the Earth as "without form, and void",[8] 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.[9]

Plato expresses a similar idea in his Timaeus, where he says:

As I said at first, when all things were in disorder God created in each thing in relation to itself, and in all things in relation to each other, all the measures and harmonies which they could possibly receive. For in those days nothing had any proportion except by accident; nor did any of the things which now have names deserve to be named at all — as, for example, fire, water, and the rest of the elements. All these the creator first set in order, and out of them he constructed the universe.[10]

Plato acknowledges a debt to Hesiod in this dialogue, but Hesiod's concept of Chaos has been altered somewhat here,[11] and begins to approach the informal sense of chaos as disorder.

Scientific and mathematical chaos

Mathematically, chaos means deterministic behaviour that is very sensitive to its initial conditions.[12] 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, and so are completely predictable given perfect knowledge of the initial conditions. In other words, a chaotic system will always exhibit the same behaviour when seeded with the same initial conditions - there is no inherent randomness in this regard. [13] However, such perfect knowledge is never attainable in real life; slight errors are intrinsic to any physical measurement. In a chaotic system, these slight errors will give rise to results which differ wildly from the correct result. A commonly used example is weather forecasting, which is only possible up to about a week ahead,[14] despite theoretically being perfectly possible at any level (ignoring the effects of the uncertainty principle).

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.[15] 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 Theogony of Hesiod, Transl. H.G. Evelyn White (1914):116-225, online.
  4. ^ Jean Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, Cornell University Press, 1984, p 105, ISBN 0801492939.
  5. ^ Gregory Vlastos and Daniel W. Graham, Studies in Greek Philosophy, Volume 1: The Presocratics, Princeton University Press, 1996, p 11, ISBN 0691019371.
  6. ^ Daniel W. Graham, Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 2006, p 26, ISBN 0691125406.
  7. ^ Roger D. Woodard, The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, Cambridge University Press, 2007, page 100, ISBN 0521845203.
  8. ^ The Holy Bible, King James Version, online.
  9. ^ Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1, online
  10. ^ Plato, Timaeus, translated by Benjamin Jowett, online
  11. ^ E. E. Pender, "Chaos corrected: Hesiod in Plato's creation myth," Chapter 11 of G. R. Boys-Stones and J. H. Haubold, Plato and Hesiod, Oxford University Press, 2009, ISBN 0199236348.
  12. ^ Saber N. Elaydi, Discrete Chaos, Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1999, page 117.
  13. ^ Werndl, Charlotte (2009). What are the New Implications of Chaos for Unpredictability?. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60, 195-220.
  14. ^ Robert G. Watts, Global Warming and the Future of the Earth, Morgan & Claypool, 2007, page 17.
  15. ^ Christopher G. Langton. "Computation at the edge of chaos". Physica D, 42, 1990.

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