Friday, February 5, 2010

Chaos & 21st century

The 21st century is the century of chaos. One of the greatest physicists of our time, Stephen Hawking noted in the year 2000,
‘I think the next century will be the century of complexity’
. Chaos consists of sequences singled out from a chaotic complex system. The difficulty however is that the ever changing nature of chaos is non-repeatable, which makes it difficult to follow the trajectory of its motion into the future.
Now if you were a natural scientist you would come up with equations and note down the constant changes in a given system and try to find a discernible pattern in the system. To give an example, that is how the weather forecasters approach the changes in the weather. Economists too, in their own right, deal with chaotic systems and make their best guess of the future state of an economic system, say, the stock market.

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