I'm reading through a used copy of Joe Pritchard's "The Chaos Cookbook" that I recently obtained from Amazon. This post contains my notes from Chapter 1.
On page 26 he notes that Newton's laws of motion cannot predict the general result of three solid balls colliding simultaneously. At first I thought that this was not true since I remember solving problems like this in general physics. However, after further thought I realized that we can predict which direction a ball will be traveling after the collision only if we already know what happened to the other balls. In other words, we cannot predict the outcome of the collision entirely; we must know something about what happened.
The above example may be considered as a subsequent loss of information that occurs following the collision of all three balls.
Historically speaking, nonlinear systems subjected to analysis were either 1) treated only to first order where higher order effects were negligible (e.g. a simple pendulum displaced slightly from its resting position), or 2) too difficult to analyze thoroughly.
A system may appear periodic in a reduced-dimensional phase space (see Fig. 1.3). A corkscrew trajectory along one axis will appear circular when looking down this axis.
Period doubling leads to splitting in a system's power spectrum. As the number of period doublings occur, does the spectrum fill with peaks and appear as white noise (uniform power spectrum)? Does this form a link to diffusive processes? (The Facebook link to white noise contains some block diagrams. Perhaps these can be shown to be equivalent to some chaotic systems.)
Chaos can emerge both in iterated function systems and from sets of differential equations.
Chaotic systems may eventually settle into seemingly stable states and vice versa.
A "lab notebook" about my life in science, programming, and philosophy.
