SOC 201 Chapter 3: Chapter 3.2
Document Summary
This was unsettling news to many physicists who wanted to believe that if they kept working at it, they would someday (at least theoretically) be able to measure and predict everything in the cosmos. Some physical scientists seem simply to ignore it. And, in point of fact, a great deal of scientific progress can be made by treating phenomena as if they are predictable. Recently, however, some scientists have become more receptive to the unpredictable or chaotic nature of the world. A rising column of cigarette smoke breaks into wild swirls. A flag snaps back and forth in the wind. A dripping faucet goes from a steady pattern to a random one. Chaos appears in the behavior of the weather, the behavior of an airplane in flight, the behavior of cars clustering on an expressway, the behavior of oil flowing in underground pipes.
