Strange Attractors. Don't take me seriously.

I'm not smart, and I'm not trying to pretend like I am. Is it not though extremely humorous when smart people come around and tell other smart people that they're not as smart as they think they are? Moreover, for us not so smart people,is it not even more humorous to expect one thing out of something you learn, only to find out there is so much more going on that might end up negating what you think you know?

I love humor.

This is my very naive attempt to introduce, only for the sake of fun, a term that mathematician's have come up with that is very bothersome to our dependence on physical laws (such as the Keplerian laws).

What it more or less has to say, with relevance to what we've been studying in class, is that if you want to predict the future or the past state of an object, be it in our case a planet, you're only going to get into more trouble as you try to be more exact.

This was brought up in a class I am taking whose goal is to evaluate the nature of the presentation of the various scientific disciplines. We're reading a book by a guy named Ivar Ekeland, the president of Universite Paris and a seriously renowned mathematician. We're reading his book because of its notes on the importance of perturbations in astronomy, because it allows you to notice how false some of our physical astronomical laws may in fact be.

His thesis is, relative to Keplarian law, that you cannot be exact in your prediction of the position of a planet because you have to take into equation the multitude of various perturbations present in space - most specifically those of the other planets. It's striking to see phase graphs that, when simulating the perturbations of other planets, indicate that you can only predict via probability where that planet is going to be.

Because one, or even a computer for that matter, cannot begin to fathom this above stated multitude of various influences, we can never know something like the above example for sure. Unfortunately this may be the case for predicting anything physical, and this might be troubling to many.

This shit is hilarious, and in no way shape or form directly important to any of us when it comes to everyday things. It's really only integral when you want to understand how things will be many many years from now, or many many years ago.

I will probably write some more on this topic as its ramifications become more relative to what we study in class.