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Originally Posted by Dragar
The 'butterfly effect' is nothing close to nonsense. Tiny inputs can have pronounced effects on the future evolution of a system. Even something as grandiose as the solar system- often cited as the archetypical predictable, deterministic, clockwork system - becomes (on a large enough timescale) completely unpredictable.
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True. But there is no single time scale. Large and small are words.
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The errors in or measurements; the missing effects of extra planetary bodies; the subtle behaviour of asteroid belts: any of these small inputs vastly change the future evolution of the solar system. They are not just drowned out.
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They even come back again and again. The points where they do that are called nodes or addresses.
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The while point of non-linear systems is that you can't assume small effects are 'drowned out', because over time those non-linear effects propagate through the mathematics, often driven by the linear terms, to become comparable to anything you are using to 'drown them' out.
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Through the mathematics? What an imprecise term.
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Chaos - even in the solar system - was such a big discovery it so the physics community of its day to the core.
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The core?