The next part of my seven part explanation of chaos theory to a popular audience. Chaos is a mechanism that allows deterministic objects to behave unpredictably. I will explain why this happens and what kinds of predictions we can make when something is chaotic. So far, we have discussed mostly phenomenology. I would present some model – either physical or mathematical – and then describe its behavior. Now, instead of just describing the behavior, it’s time to understand how this behavior arises. What is the basic mechanism creating the strange behavior of chaotic systems? Why do some systems exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions? How can similar initial conditions rapidly become dramatically different, without everything flying apart? By now you should have seen that these sorts of behavior do happen. But how do they happen? The underlying mechanism is the title of this section: stretch and fold.
