Chaos

2 Comments

  1. Jonathan Davies says

    Hi James, I hope you don’t mind me writing to you directly.
    I read Chaos a few years ago, an incredible book, Thankyou!

    There is a passage which keeps turning over in my head.
    Page 258
    “To Robert Shaw, strange attractors were engines of information. In his first and greatest conception, chaos offered a natural way of returning to the physical sciences, in reinvigorated form, the ideas that information theory had drawn from thermodynamics. strange attractors, conflating order and disorder, gave a challenging twist to the question of measuring a system’s entropy. Strange attractors served as efficient mixers. They created unpredictability. They raised entropy. And as Shaw saw it, they created information where none existed.”

    I wanted to read more on this subject.
    I have read a few books on Information theory(including yours), but they don’t address this concept…
    that “chaos can create information where none existed”
    ….could you recommend further reading?

  2. Scott Jackson, PhD says

    James: What do you think about the following hypothesis? There are two kinds of chaos, natural chaos and induced chaos. Natural chaos is the chaos we experience as we travel through space, Induced chaos is the chaos that is stimulated by objects, such as butterflies.

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