Chaos Theory: beware that butterfly in the amazon

Did you, when growing up, enjoy tossing pebbles into the water at dams and rivers? Did it fascinate you how from the point at which they entered the water, a wave would start, and many others would start, all the way to the river bank? When I was in the University, I and a friend we used to call Ndiki Mutungu (in English that’d be fat Dickson) used to frolic to the basement of the UON’s Jomo Kenyatta Library on frequent occasion.

That frequent occasion would be practically every time we were at the library to read according to the syllabus at hand, or as expected by our tutors. As a law student, I would be carrying my notes on the law of torts, or law of evidence, or insurance or whatever other law of this-and-that. I would be hoping to supplement them by reading a textbook by Halsbury, Prof. Yash Pal Ghai, Githu Muigai, Collinvaux on insurance Law or some other egghead worthy.

Trouble is, me and Ndiki would get bored with the textbooks and invariably, find ourselves in the library basement. There we found all manner of old books on all diverse and crazy subjects including bound volumes of newspapers and magazines from the 70s through to the 80s. Even an occasional dusty, fungi infested, dog eared, charred dialogues of Plato.

I read my first book on Socrates twice, in the gloom of that basement. It was such a delight. There was an old, forgotten, dusty room with windows facing out. We cleaned it, and there we would lock ourselves, play chess, smoke, read and argue philosophy, politics, religion. Heady days, those were. I give this story to lead you to my interest in abstract, apparently silly thoughts, arts, sciences.

Things that cannot give me bread but fascinate to no end. If science is all problem solving, what, pray tell, were the Americans and the Russians going to the moon to do? In my view the true scientists are simply bright guys who cannot stand the thought of being in a state of the curious and confounded yet blissfully unaware believer. People out to solve problems are simply craftsmen. That is what a bachelor’s degree is designed to make of you. A fundi. A fundi cannot make great music.

The sessions in that basement still lead me to muse about black-holes in the universe, about the complexity of the human genome, and such profound questions as why women blink nearly twice as much as men (do they?), and such other matters of inestimable depth. It is no surprise then that I am immensely interested in the wonderfully convoluted hypothesis called the CHAOS Theory.

In your everyday lay language, chaos refers to lack of order. In scientific context, chaos refers to an apparent lack of order. Apparent because any system no matter how disorderly relies upon an underlying order. That is The Chaos Theory. It is also called the butterfly effect, and was first described by Edward Lorenz (generally credited as the first experimenter in the area of chaos) at the 1972 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. Butterfly effect is a grandiose metaphor he rhetorically asked as the subject of his presentation; “Predictability: Can the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?” (Do not take that literally). Eddie surmised that two main components of chaos theory are that systems – no matter how complex – rely upon an underlying order, and that very simple or small systems and events can cause very complex behaviours or events. He called the latter idea sensitive dependence on initial conditions.