CHAOS, AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT ----------------------------------------------------------- Georgia Tech PHYS 7123 Fall semester 2001 Predrag Cvitanovic' Lecture 31 11:05-12:25 Thu Dec 6 2001 in Howey N209 Truth in advertising: What went wrong with this course? ------------------------------------------------------- Once a textbook is written, it seems to be the truth. But nothing looked clear when we started out on this path, and I think other people might have formulated rather different theories at least as convincing. The problem, posed in its most general form, is old and appears under many guises: Why are clouds the way they are? Is the solar system stable? What determines the structure of turbulence in liquids, the noise in electronic circuits, the stability of plasma in a tokomak? How can a system of so many imperfect components as the brain work so well? What we wanted to do was to junk your old equations and look for guidance in clouds' repeating patterns. Then prove quark confinement as an effect of Yang-Mills turbulence, write the universal equation for the brain (not kidding), and finally, understand why the clouds are the way they are. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Term papers due no later than 16:00 Tue Dec 11 2001 - Predrag's office -------------------------------------------------------------------