Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Chaos Theory Changed the Universe

Episode Date: December 5, 2020

Since the age of Descartes, science has put all of its eggs in the basket of determinism, the idea that with accurate enough measurements any aspect of the universe could be predicted. But the universe, it turns out, is not so tidy. Explore the final frontier with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, your old pal, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen how chaos theory changed the universe. First came out in July of 2016, and I have to say, I think it's one of the better science-y stuff

you should know, episodes of all time. There's just something about this that grabbed me and Chuck by the collars and said, I'm interesting, aren't I? And we said, yes, you definitely are. And this one has everything. It has science, it has philosophy, it has our understanding of the universe.

It's just an all-around good episode. So I hope you enjoy it as much as I did listening to it again. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. So this is Stuff You Should Know,

the podcast about chaos theory. Like, have you ever seen Event Horizon? I did, not bad. Great movie, are you crazy? I think it was great. Oh, it was so imaginative. I thought it was okay. It was like a love-create movie.

It was like a love-create movie. It was like a love-craftian thing in outer space. Yeah. Loved it. It was all right. I love crafted it. Yeah. I liked it.

That's what I think of when I think of chaos. You know, there's that one part where they kind of give you a glimpse behind the dimension that this action is taking place in to see the chaos underneath. I should check that out again. Yeah, I think you should. I think about Jurassic Park and Jeff Goldblum as the creep,

Dr. Malcolm explaining chaos in the little auto-driving SUV or whatever that was. Right. Yeah. That's what it was called in the script, the auto-driving SUV scene. Yeah. And you know what?

I actually re-watched that scene and it confirmed two things. One is that he actually did a pretty decent job for a Hollywood movie with a very rudimentary explanation of chaos. Yeah. And it also. Oh, you watched it for this?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, just that scene. And then it also confirmed of what a creep that character was. Yeah. If you watch that scene, he's like, you know, he was all gross and flirty with her

right in front of her ex. Right. But there's this, you know, he's talking to her. I didn't even notice this at first. He like, he just like touches her hair out of nowhere for no reason. Really? He's just talking to her and he just like

grabs her hair and touches it. And I'm like, what a creep. I know. If you look closely, you can see the hormones emerging through his chest hair. Yeah. It's grody. I love Jeff Goldblum.

It's not a reflection on him. He was basically doing Jeff Goldblum. Well, that's what he, yeah, sure. He's Jeff Goldblum. But I don't think that's how in the manner in which he speaks, but I don't think he's a creep. Do you? Wow.

I've gotten nothing against Jeff Goldblum. I think he's a, I think he's doing Jeff Goldblum. It was also a sign of the times. Like if that movie were made today, Doctor, what was her name in the movie? Ellie Sattler, I think? Yeah. Doctor Sattler would be like,

it's very inappropriate to stroke my hair, dude. Yeah. Like don't touch me. Right. But this was the 90s. Or was it the 90s? Yeah, it was freewheeling. It was eight.

No, it was 90s. It was the early mid 90s, I think. 92, 93, 94. The book came out in 1990. And in the book, Ian Malcolm, who's a catechian. Yeah, a creep catechian. Right, he goes into even more depth about chaos there. No, I'm sure.

But that was, I mean, that was the first time I ever heard of chaos theory was from Jurassic Park. Yeah, me too, probably. And it really, it was really misleading. I think the entire term chaos is very misleading as far as the general public goes as from what I researched in this, for this article. Well, yeah, I mean, you hear the word chaos

as an English speaker and you think frenetic and crazy. Out of control? Yeah, and that's not what it means in terms of science like this. Right, what it means, I guess we can say up front, is basically the idea that complex systems do not behave in very neat ways that we can easily grasp, understand, or measure.

Right, and not even simple systems don't sometimes. It doesn't always have to be complex, but I wanna give a shout out, in addition to our own article, to when it comes to stuff like this, the brain breaking stuff for me. Man, this was a brain breaker. You know how I always go to blank blank for kids

because it always helps. If there's a dinosaur mascot on the page, it's a sure thing we can understand it. But the best explanation for all the stuff that I found on the internet was from a website called Abarim, A-B-A-R-I-M Publications, which turns out to be a website about biblical patterns and sandwiched in the middle there

is a really great, easy to understand series of pages on chaos there. Nice. So I was like, man, I get it now. I mean, in a rudimentary way. Right, well, yeah, yeah. I think even a lot of people who deal with systems that display chaotic behavior, which I guess is to say basically all systems,

eventually under the right conditions, don't necessarily understand chaos. Yeah, and they define a complex system as specifically, it doesn't mean just like, oh, it's complex. I mean, it is, but specifically, they define it in a way that helped me understand. It's a system that has so much motion, so many elements that are in motion.

Moving parts. Yeah, that it takes like a computer to calculate all the possibilities of what that could look like five minutes from now, 10 years from now. So before computers came around, we, before the quantum mechanical revolution, it was a lot more basic. It was like, what comes up must come down, stuff like that.

Let's talk about that, Chuckers, because when you're talking about chaos theory, it helps to understand how it revolutionized the universe by getting a clear picture of how we understood the universe leading up to the discovery of chaos, right? Yeah. So prior to the scientific revolution, everybody was like, oh, well, it's God.

The earth is at the center of the universe and God is spinning everything around like a top, right? Yeah. It was all a theistic explanation. Then the scientific revolution happens and people start applying things like math and making like mathematical discoveries and figuring out that there are,

there's order, they're finding order in patterns and predictability to the universe if you can apply mathematics to it. Yeah, specifically if you can apply mathematics to the starting point. Right, right. So if you can figure out how a system works, mathematically speaking, right?

You can go in and plug in whatever coordinates you want to and watch it go. You can predict what the outcome's gonna be. And what this is, it's based on what at the time was a totally revolutionary idea by, initially, I think Descartes was the first one to kind of say, cause and effect is a pretty big part of our universe, right?

Yeah, it was sort of like where, this is 1600s where early science met philosophy. Right. They kind of complimented one another as far as something that's, we're talking about determinism. Right, so that was the kind of the seeds of determinism was the scientific revolution and like you said,

where philosophy and science came together in the form of Descartes, right? Yeah. And then Newton came along and we did a whole episode on him. Yeah, January of this year. That was a good one. It was really good.

Like, I think you said in that episode that there's possibly no scientist that's changed the world more than Newton has. Maybe. He's got legs. People shouted out others in email, but I'll just say he's near the top for sure with some other people.

The cream. Yeah. So Newton came along and Newton said. That was his name. Isaac the cream. Right. I think. Anytime he dunked to be like, cream.

Yeah. You just got creamed. Oh, I thought he was a boxer. He's a basketball player. He was much more well known as a boxer, but he definitely could dunk as a b-baller. Yeah. So man, that threw me off a little bit.

That's right. Cream. Yeah, the cream comes along and he basically says, watch this, dudes. This cause and effect thing you're talking about. I can express it in quantifiable terms. And he comes up with all of these great laws and basically sets the stage,

the foundation for science for the next three centuries or so. Yeah. These laws that were so rock solid and powerful that scientists kind of got ahead of themselves a little and said, we're done. Like with Newton's laws, we can predict everything

if we have a good enough beginning accurate value to plug into his equations. And they weren't, I think there was a little hubris and a little just excitement about like, well, we figured it all out. Right, that you could take Newton's laws and if you had accurate enough measurements, you could predict what the outcome would be

of that system that you plug those measurements into using this formula, right? And at the time, a lot of this was like planetary, like, well, we know that these planets are here and they're moving and they're orbiting. So if we know these things, we can plug it into an equation and we can figure out what it's gonna be like in 100 years.

Exactly, and they figured out and the basis of determinism is what we just said that if you have accurate measurements, you can take those measurements and use them to predict how a system is going to change over time using differential equations, right? Yeah.

So this is what Newton comes along and figures out that you can describe the universe in these mathematical terms using differential equations. And like you said, there was a tremendous amount of hubris and well, I think you said there were some hubris. I think there was a tremendous amount of hubris where science basically said, we've mastered the universe. We've uncovered the blueprint of the universe

and now we understand everything. It's just a matter now of getting our scientific measurements more and more and more exact. Because again, the hallmark of determinism is that if you have exact measurements, you can predict an outcome accurately. Like the pool cue example or the pool table example, right?

Right, so if you've got a pool table, let's say you're playing some nine ball. Right. So you have that beautiful little diamond set up. You got your cue ball. You put that cue ball and you crack it with the cue. And if you are super accurate with your initial measurements, you should be able to mathematically plot out

the angles where the balls will end up. Right, exactly. Like you can say this is what the table will look like after the break. If you know the force, the angle, all those little variables. The temperature, if there's wind in the room, like the felt on the table, like everything,

the more specific you are, the more accurate your end result will be. Right, and then one of the other hallmarks of determinism is that if you take those exact same initial conditions and do them again, the table, the pool table will look exactly the same after the break. Yeah, which is pretty much impossible for like a human to do with their hands.

Sure, but the idea at the time of science was that if you could build a perfect machine that could recreate these conditions, it will happen the same way every time, right? Yeah, and this led to, they had hubris, but you could understand it when, like literally in 1846, two people predicted Neptune would exist.

Yeah, within months of these years. That would exist, but does exist. And this is not by looking up in the sky, like they did it with math, and they were right. So imagine in 1846, when that happens, they're like, yeah, we've got the math down, so we're pretty much all knowing. Well, plus also for the most part,

these, not just with Neptune, they were finding that this stuff really panned out. It held true for everything from the investigation into electricity to new chemical reactions and understanding those. And it laid the scientific revolution, laid the basis for the industrial revolution and just the change that came out of the world like that.

It definitely, it is understandable how science kind of was like, we got it all figured out. Well, and like you said, they even Galileo was smart enough to know there's uncertainty in these measurements. Like the precision is key. So they spent, what does the article say? A lot of the, much of the 19th and 20th century,

just trying to build better instrumentation to get more and more smaller and smaller and more precise measurements. Right, that was like basically the goal of it, right? Yeah, which was the right direction. That's like exactly what they should have been doing. Yeah. The problem is they, like you said,

Galileo knew that there was some sort of, there were gonna be some flaws in measurement that we just didn't have those great scientific instruments yet, right? Yeah, it's called the uncertainty principle. Okay. The prohibits accuracy. Right, but the idea is that if you have

good enough instruments, you can overcome that. And that the more you shrink the error in measuring the initial conditions, the more you're gonna shrink the error in the outcome. Yeah. It'd be proportionate, right? They were correct. The thing is, they were also aware,

but ignoring in a lot of ways, some outstanding problems, specifically something called the end body problem. Yeah, you know what? I'm so excited about this. I need to take a break. I think that's a good idea. I need to go check out my end body in the bathroom.

Okay. And we'll be back. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia

starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass? And my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

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So there's some, there's some issues, right? With determinism. There's some, some weird problems out there that are saying like, eh, hey, pay attention to me because I'm not sure determinism works. Right. Uh-huh. And one is the end body problem. Yeah, how this came about was in 1885, there was King Oscar number two of Sweden and Norway.

Yeah. Don't want to leave out Norway, both. He said, you know what, let's offer a prize to anyone who can prove the stability of the solar system. Yeah. Something that has been stable for a long time before that. And a lot of the most brilliant minds on planet Earth got together and tried to do this with mathematical proofs and no one could do it.

Uh, and then a dude named Henri, you got to help me there with that last name. Poincaré. Oh, say the whole thing. Henri Poincaré. Very nice. He was French, believe it or not, and he was a mathematician and he said, you know what, I'm not going to look at this big picture of all the planets in the sun and all their orbits.

You'd have to be a fool to try that. Sure. You'd have to put this down like we talked about, shrinking that initial value, you know, and that initial condition. He shrunk it down. He said, I'm going to look at just a couple of bodies orbiting one another with a common center of gravity, and I'm going to look at this, and this was called the in-body problem. Yeah, which was smart to do because the more variables you factor into a nonlinear equation

like that, just the harder it's going to be. He shrunk it down. So the in-body problem has to do with three or more celestial bodies orbiting one another. So Poincaré said, oh, let's just start with three. Yeah. Smart. And what he found from doing his equations for this King Oscar, the sequel prize was that shrinking the initial conditions measurement or rate of error, right?

Yeah. Did not really shrink the error in the outcome, which flies in the face of determinism. What he found was that just very, very minute differences in the initial conditions fed into a system produced wildly different outcomes after a fairly short time. Yeah, like let me just round off the mass of this planet at like the eighth decimal point. Right. Like, you know, who cares? Who cares?

At that point. Yeah. Let me just round that one to a two. Right. And that would throw everything off at a pretty high rate. Right. And he said, wait a minute, I think this contest is impossible. Right.

He said, there is no way to prove the stability of the solar system because he just uncovered the idea that it's impossible for us to predict the rate of change among celestial bodies. Yeah. It's such a complex system. There are far too many variables that it's impossible to start with something so minute to get the equation or whatever, the sum that you want at the end. Right. Well, not only that.

A lot of sum, I guess, but the result. Not only that, and this is what really undermined determinism was that he figured out that you would have to have an infinitely precise measurement, which even if you built a perfect machine that could take the infinitely, or a perfect machine that could take a measurement of like the movement of a celestial body around another, it's literally impossible to get an infinitely precise measurement, which means that we could never predict out to a certain degree the movement of these celestial bodies. He was saying, no, you can't build a machine that gets measurements enough that we can

overcome this. Determinism is wrong. You can't just say, we have the understanding to predict everything. There's a lot of stuff out there that we're not able to predict, and he uncovered it trying to figure out this end body problem. Yeah, and King Oscar the sequel said, you win. Bring me another rack of lamb, and here's your prize. He won by proving that it was impossible, which is pretty interesting.

And that utterly and completely changed, not just math, but our understanding of the universe and our understanding of our understanding of the universe, which is even more kind of earth shaking. Yeah, he discovered dynamical instability or chaos, and they didn't have supercomputers at the time. So it would be a little while, about 70 years at MIT until we could actually kind of feed these things into machines capable of plotting these things out in a way that we could see, which was really incredible.

So there was this dude 70 years later named Edward Lawrence, or Lawrence. Yeah. Well, first of all, we should set the stage. The reason this guy, he was a meteorologist and scientist, not that those are not the same thing. He's a scientist who dabbled in meteorology. Right. He was a mathematician.

Yeah, but he was really into meteorology because there was a weird juxtaposition at the time where we were sending people into outer space, but we couldn't predict the weather. Yeah, and it was definitely a blot on the field of meteorology. People were like, do you guys know what you're doing? Yeah. And meteorologists are like, you have no idea how hard this is. Yeah. Like, yeah, we can predict it a couple of days out, but after that, it's totally unpredictable.

It drives us mad. And it wasn't just their reputations that were at stake. People were losing their lives because of it, right? Yeah, in 1962, there were two notorious storms, one on the East Coast and one on the West, the Ash Wednesday storm in the East and the Big Blow on the West that killed a lot of people, cost hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. And people were like, we need to be able to see these things coming a little more because it's a problem.

And meteorologists were like, why don't you do it then? So they thought the key was these big supercomputers. After the supercomputers, when they came out, the big rooms full of hardware, it was amazing. And they were finally able to do these incredible calculations that we could never do before. I know. They were able to crunch 64 bytes a second. Yeah. We had the abacus and then the supercomputer.

Right. There was nothing in between. I looked up the computer that Lawrence was working with. Was it the Whopper? A Royal McBee. What was the Whopper? Wargames. Was it called the Whopper?

Yeah. W-O-P-R. Yeah. I can't believe they called it that. I know. Pretty stupid. So the guy just nicknamed it Joshua? No.

Joshua was the... Software? Falcon was the old man who designed all the stuff and his son was Joshua and that was the password to get into the system. Oh, that was the password. Yeah. I guess I was too young to understand what a password was. Yeah.

Okay. You didn't even... There weren't passwords at the time. No. Password was a game show. And you just shouted it at the computer and they're like, okay, access granted. Yeah. That's still...

That movie holds up. Does it really? Oh, totally. We got to check it out. Yeah. Still very, very fun. Young Allie Sheedy Boy had a crush on her from that movie. She was great.

Yeah. What else was she in recently? Wasn't she in something? Well, I mean, she kind of went away for a while and then had her big comeback with that indie movie, High Art, but that was a while ago. Has she been in anything else recently? Sure. I think I saw her in something recently and I didn't realize it was her.

Oh, really? Yeah. She looks familiar. I was like, oh, that's Allie Sheedy. I don't know. All right. I could look it up, but I won't. It doesn't matter.

Anyway, I still crushed on her. So the Royal McBee was not quite the whopper. You could actually sit down at it. The Royal McBee? That's the name of it. That sounds like a hamburger too. It was by the Royal Typewriter Company and they got into computers for a second. And this is the kind of computer that Lawrence was working with.

And it was a huge deal, like you were saying, Abacus Supercomputer. But it was still pretty dumb as far as what we have today is concerned. But it was enough that Lawrence was like, Lawrence and his ilk were like, finally, we can start running models and actually predict the weather. He started doing just that. He did. So he started off with a computational model of 12 meteorological, meteorological. I liked how you said it.

Calculations, which is very basic because they're infinite meteorological calculations probably depending. Did I say it wrong again? No, no, no. It sounds like you're about to say it wrong and then you pull it out at the last second. It's really impressive. So that's very basic, but he wanted to start out with something attainable. So he narrowed it down to 12 conditions, basically.

12 calculations that had temperature, wind speed, pressure, stuff like that. He did forecasting weather. And then he said, you know, it'd be great if you could see this. So I'm going to spit it into my Wonder Machine, the Whopper, what was it? The Royal McBee. The Royal McBee. And I'm going to get a print out so you can visualize what this looks like. So things were going well and he had this print out and everyone was amazed because

these calculations never seemed to repeat themselves. He was making like word art, you remember that? That was the first thing anybody did on a computer was to make word art like a butterfly or something. Right. You would print out. Yeah. I never could do that.

I couldn't either. You have to be able to visualize things spatially. You have to have that right kind of brain for that. Right. Or you have to be following a guidebook that tells you how to do it. Have you ever seen me, you and everyone we know? Yeah. I love that movie.

Yeah. Those little kids in there. They were doing that. Oh yeah. Yeah. The forever back and forth poop. Well, I haven't seen that since it came out. It's been a while.

Oh, you got to see it again. Yeah. Great movie. Good movie. Allie Sheedy's not in it. No. It's Miranda July. Right.

And she wrote and directed too, right? She did a great job. It was her show. It's one of those rare movies where there's just the right amount of whimsy because whimsy so easily overpowers everything else and becomes like, yeah. This is like the most perfectly balanced amount of whimsy I've ever seen in a movie. Yeah. If there's too much whimsy, I just like.

Terrible. Garden state. I just want to punch it in the face. Terrible. Although I like garden state, but I haven't seen it since it came out. It hasn't aged well. Yeah. It's just, when you look at it now, it's just so cutesy and whimsical.

Oh yeah. It's like, come on. Yeah. Boy, we're getting to a lot of movies today. Oh yeah. We're stalling. We haven't even talked about butterfly effect yet, which is coming. It is.

I'm dreading it. That's why I'm stalling. All right. So where were we? He was running his calculations, printing out his values so people could see it. And then he got a little lazy one day in 1961. This output he noticed was interesting. So he said, you know, I'm going to repeat this calculation, see it again.

But I'm going to save time. I'm just going to kind of pick up in the middle. And I'm not going to input as many numbers. But I'm still using the same values, just I'm not going out to six decimal points. So the print out he had went to three decimal points. So he was working from the print out and didn't take into account that the computer accepted six decimal points. So he was just putting in three and expecting that the outcome would be the same, right?

Yes. But the outcome was way different. Right. Oh, whoa. What? Yeah. He's like, what's going on here? It was a big deal.

I mean, someone would have come up with this eventually probably. Yeah, but... And he sort of accidentally came upon it. It's neat that this guy did this because it changed his career. I think he went from emphasis on meteorology to an emphasis on chaos math. To stud scientists. Basically. So, I mean, the guy's got an attractor named after him.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, let's get to that. Lorenz starts looking at this and he's like, wait a minute. This is this is weird. This is worth investigating and like Like What was his name? Poincaré. Yeah, he said I need fewer variables So I'm not gonna try to predict weather with these 12 differential equations that you have to take into account I'm just gonna take one

aspect of weather called a rolling convection current and I'm going to see how I can Write it down in formula form. So a rolling convection current Chuck is where You know how the wind is created where? Air at the surface is heated and then starts to rise Yeah, and suddenly cool air from higher above comes in to fill that that vacuum that's left and that creates a rolling Hort or vertically based convection current. Yeah, okay, you could I would describe it as oven Oven Boiling water. Yeah cup of coffee. Sure. Wherever. There's a temperature differential

Based on a vertical alignment. You're going to have a rolling convection current. Okay Yeah, it sounds complex, but he just picked out one thing basically one condition, right? And this is the one he picked out. But had you seen my hands moving listeners, you would be like, oh, yeah I know it's your tongue. Sure. He made little rolly motions. So He he's like, okay, I can figure this out. So he comes up with three three formulae That kind of describe a rolling convection current and he starts Trying to figure out how To describe this rolling convection current, right?

Correct. And so like I said, he got this these three formulae Which were basically three variables that he calculated over time and he plugged them in and he found three variables That changed over time and he found that after a certain point when you graph these things out And since there are three you graph them out on a three dimensional graph. So x y and z again He wanted to just be able to visualize this right because easier for people to understand. He was a very visual guy totally all of a sudden it made this crazy graph That where the the line as it progressed forward through time went all over the place it went from this axis to another axis to the other axis and it would spend some time over here and then it would

Suddenly loop over to the other one and it followed no rhyme or reason. It never retraced its path and It was describing how a convection current changes over time, right? Yeah, and Lorenz is looking at this He was expecting these three things to equalize and eventually form a line Yeah, because that's what determinism says things are going to fall into a certain amount of equilibrium and just Even out over time that is not what he found no and what he discovered was what Poincare discovered which was that some systems even relatively simple systems exhibit very complex Unpredictable behavior, which you could call chaos Yeah, and when you say things were going all over like if you look at the graph it

It it's not just lines going in straight lines bouncing all over the place randomly like there was an order to it But the lines were not on top of one another like let's say you draw a figure eight with your pencil Uh-huh, and then you continue drawing that figure eight. It's gonna slip outside those curves, right every time unless you're a robot Sure, and that's what it ended up looking like. Yeah. Yeah, it never retraced the same path twice ever Um, it had a lot of really surprising properties and at the time it just fell completely outside the understanding of science, right? Yeah, luckily this happened to Lawrence who was curious enough to be like what is going on here and Again, he sat down and started to do the math and thinking about this and especially how it applied to the weather, right? Yeah, and he came up with

Something very famous. Yes the butterfly effect. Yes uh a This thing kind of looked like butterfly wings a little bit. Yeah, and B when he went to present his findings He basically had the notion he's like I'm gonna I'm gonna wow these people in the crowd in 1972 It's a conference that I'm going to and I'm gonna I'm gonna say something like you know The seagull flaps its wings and it starts a small turbulence that can one that can affect weather on the other side of the world Right, the small little thing will just grow and grow and snowball and affect things and he had a colleague was like

Seagull wings that's nice. All right, and he said how about this and this is the title they ended up with Predictability colon does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas and Everyone was like whoa. Whoa mines blown. Yeah Should we take a break? Yes. All right, we'll be right back On the podcast hey, dude the 90s called David Lashher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey, dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces We're gonna use hey, dude as our jumping-off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it

It's a podcast packed with interviews co-stars friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing each episode will rival the feeling of Taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s Listen to hey, dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app ample podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Hey, I'm lance bass host of the new iHeart podcast frosted tips with lance bass

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road Okay, I see what you're doing Do you ever think to yourself what advice would lance bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do you've come to the right place because i'm here to help this. I promise you oh god Seriously, I swear and you won't have to send an sos because i'll be there for you Oh, man, and so my husband michael um hey, that's me. Yep We know that michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step Oh, not another one. Uh-huh kids relationships life in general can get messy

You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody Yeah, everybody About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye Listen to frosted tips with lance bass on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts I'm mangash particular and to be honest I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born. It's been a part of my life in india It's like smoking you might not smoke But you're gonna get secondhand astrology and lately

I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention Because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you It got weird fast Tantric curses major league baseball teams cancelled marriages kpop But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology My whole world came crashing down situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father And my whole view on astrology

It changed Whether you're a skeptic or a believer I think your ideas are going to change too Listen to skyline drive and the eye heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts All right, so the lauren's attractor Uh is that picture that he ended up with right that graph the lauren's attractor and this biblical

pattern website that I found Described attractors and strange attractors in a way that even dumb old me could understand But you got so if I may He says, all right, here's the cycle of chaos. He said, uh Actually, I don't know who wrote this A woman could have been a small child could have been Noah of undetermined gender. I have no idea So the gender neutral

narrator They said he said, all right, think about a town That has like 10,000 people living in it to make that town work. You got to have like a gas station a grocery store a library Whatever you need to sustain that town. Okay, so all these things are built. Everyone's happy. You have equilibrium He said, so that's great. Then let's say You build some someone comes and builds a factory Uh on the outskirts of that town and there's going to be 10,000 more people living there. Right and they don't go to church

Maybe so Uh Did I say church they needed a church? No, no. Oh, okay. I was just assuming this is what's going to break the equilibrium But you just have more people so there's uh, you need another gas station and another grocery store. Let's say So they build all these things and then you reach equilibrium Again, it's maintained because you build all these other systems up I see that equilibrium is called an attractor Okay, so then he said

It said they said He capital he The royal he said All right, now let's say instead of that that factory being built you and you have those original 10,000 Let's say 3,000 those people just up and leave one day. Okay And the grocery store guy says well, there's only 7,000 people here We need 8,000 people living here to to make a profit

So I'm shutting down this grocery store Then all of a sudden you have demand for groceries So things go on for a little while and someone comes in and say hey, this town needs a grocery store They build a grocery store, right? They can't sustain they shut down someone else comes along because of the demand and it is this search for equilibrium this

Dinet well you reach equilibrium here and there as the store opens periods of stability periods of stability And that dynamic equilibrium is called a strange attractor So an attractor Is the state which a system settles on strange attractor? Is the trajectory on which it Never settles down but tries to reach the equilibrium with periods of stability. Does that make sense? That bible-based explanation was dynamite. I understand it better than I did before and I understood it okay before That's great. It's really can add

Yeah, yeah, no you're gonna add to it. No, that's it. No, I mean like it Yeah, and attractor is where if you graph something and eventually it reaches equilibrium It's a regular attractor if it never reaches equilibrium It is constantly trying to and has periods of stability strange attractor. I can't I can't top that all right grocery store small town That was great. So, um, Lorenz's strange attractor was named a Lorenz attractor named after him big deal They weren't using the word chaos yet. No, but He published that paper about butterfly wings, right? Yeah, the butterfly effect and It coupled with his picture is the picture of a strange attractor, which is almost the

Aside from fractals almost the the the Emblem or the logo for chaos theory the Lorenz attractor is It got attention off the bat. It wasn't like Poincare's findings where he got neglected for 70 years Almost immediately everybody was talking about this because again what Lorenz had uncovered Which is the same thing that Poincare had uncovered is that determinism is possibly

Uh based on an illusion. Yeah, that the universe isn't stable that the universe isn't predictable And that what we are seeing as stable and predictable are these little periods Windows of stability that are found in strange attractor graphs. Yeah, that's what we think the order of the universe is but that that is actually the um abnormal aspect of the universe and that instability Unpredictability as far as we're concerned is the actual state of affairs in in nature and I think as far as we're concerned is a really important point too Chuck because It doesn't mean that nature is unstable right chaotic

It means that our picture of what we understand as order doesn't jibe with how the universe actually functions Yeah, it's just our understanding of it. Yeah, and we're just so um Anthropocentric that you know, we we see it as chaos and disorder and something to be feared right when really it's just complexity that we Don't have the capability of predicting. Yeah After a certain degree. Yeah, I think that makes me feel a little better because when you read stuff like this You start to feel like Well, the earth could just throw us all off of its face at any moment Because it starts spinning so fast that gravity becomes undone and I know that's not right by the way

I've always loved that kind of science that shows. We don't know anything like Robert Hume who I know I understand was a philosopher, but he was a philosopher scientist. Sure His whole jam was like cause and effect is an illusion That like we all we it's it's just an assumption like that if you drop a pencil it will always fall down It's an illusion and this is pre Um, gravity understanding gravity, but he makes a good point gravity when everyone's just floating around Yeah Going this pencil's got me wacky. Yeah, but but the point was that you know, we we are we base

A lot of our assumptions um Or a lot of stuff that we take as law are actually based on assumptions that are made from observations over time And that we're just making predictions that cause and effect is an illusion. I love that guy pretty cool This this definitely supports that idea for sure Sorry, I'm I'm excited about chaos theory. Can you believe it? Well, I mean I like that I'm able to understand it in enough of a rudimentary way that I can talk about it at a dinner party Well, thank your bible website

Well, once you take the formulas out. Yeah for people like us We're like, oh, okay. We can understand chaos. Yeah, then when somebody says good do a differential equation You're just like what a what a different equation All right. All right. So earlier I said that chaos had not been used the word chaos to describe all this junk right And that didn't happen until uh later on and well actually About 10 years, you know, but it was kind of at the same time. This other stuff was going on with uh lorenz Yeah, late 60s early 70s. There was a guy named stevens mail

uh fields metal recipients. So, you know, he's good at math and um He described something that we now know as the snail horseshoe And it goes a little something like this So, all right, take a piece of uh dough like like bread dough Okay, and you smash it out into a big flat rectangle can do so you're looking at that thing and you're like boy I hope this makes some good bread. This is gonna be so good. So then you just a little rosemary on it. Yeah, maybe so Uh, well sea salt. Yeah, and then um lick it before you bake it. So, you know, it's yours. No one else can have it

Uh, so you you have that flat rectangle of dough. You roll it up into a uh a tube and then you smash that down kind of flat And then you bend that down to where it eventually looks like a horseshoe. Okay So now you take that horseshoe you take another rectangle of dough and you throw that horseshoe onto that And then you do the same thing the snail horseshoe basically says You cannot predict where the two points of that horseshoe will end up. Yeah You can roll it a million times and it'll end up in a million different places Totally random different places too. Totally random. You never know. It's like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get

You have to say it and that became known. You have to say it. Oh, what imitate force comp. Sure No, I can't do that. That's fine. He's not one. He's not in my repertoire That's fine Although I did see that again part of it recently Does it hold up? Well, I mean take out 40 minutes of it and it would have been a better movie Yeah, like all of that Coincidence stuff that Oh, I love that. I thought that was so charming. And he also did the smile t-shirt like it was just too much

Like he really hammered it too much. I liked it That was the basis of the movie. I know but see it again, and I guarantee you like an hour and a half into it You'll be like I get it Zemeckis, you know, it was a good Tom Hanks movie that was overlooked a road to perdition Yeah, not bad. It was a good one. Great Sam Mendes. Oh man, that guy's awesome. Yeah. Oh, what is he gonna do? He might do something. He did the James Bond. He did skyfall. Yeah, yeah I know he's gonna do and also that last one that wasn't so great. He's got a potential project coming up And he would be amazing for it. I don't remember what it was. Did you see revolutionary road? Yes. God

It was just like, yeah, you want to jump off a bridge? Yeah Like every five minutes during that movie that was hardcore it is Uh, he did that one too, huh? Yeah, and don't see that if you're like engaged to be married or thinking about it Yeah, or if you're blue already. Yeah. I'm yeah, just take a really good good mood and be like I'm sick of being in a good mood. Sit down and watch revolutionary road. Yeah. Watch Joe versus the volcano instead great movie uh where was I smell horseshoe is what that's called and um That was he was the first person to actually use the word chaos. Oh, he was I think so. No, no, no York was Tom York's dad

Yeah, you're right. He wasn't the first person. You're correct, but it smells horseshoe illustrates a really good point Chuck Is it Tom York's dad? No. Oh, okay. No, but they're both British Sure, Yorkies. Actually one's Australian No, they're British. All right. Um, so Those two points Which should which started out right by each other and then ended up in two totally different places Yeah, that applies not just to bread dough, but also to things like water molecules Yeah, that are right next to each other at some point and then uh month later. They're in two different oceans

Yeah, even though you would assume that they would go through all the same motions and everything Oh, sure But they're not there's so many different variables with things like ocean currents that uh two water molecules that were once side by side end up in Totally random different places. Yeah, and that's part of chaos. It's basically chaos personified. Yeah, or chaos molecule fide So we mentioned york, uh where I was going with that was um, there was an australian named Robert May And he was a population biologist. Yeah, so he was using math to model How animal populations would change over time?

giving certain starting conditions uh, so he started using uh These equations differential equations and he came up with a formula known as the logistic difference equation That basically enabled him to predict these animal populations pretty well Yeah, it was working pretty well for a while, but he noticed something really really weird, right? Yeah He had this formula, um The logistic difference equation. Yeah is the name of it. Sure. Okay, so we had that formula and He figured out that if you took r which in this case was the reproductive rate of an animal population

Yeah, and you pushed it past three the number three. So that meant that the average animal in this population of animals had three offspring in its lifetime or in a season whatever. Yeah, if you pushed it past three all of a sudden the number of the population Would diverge. Yeah, if you pushed it equal to three actually or more, right? It would diverge. Yeah Which is weird because a population of animals can't be two different numbers, you know Like that herd of antelope is not there's not 30, but there's also 45 of them at the same time

Yeah, that's called a superposition and that has to do with quantum states not herds of antelopes sure That was kind of weird and then he found if you pushed it a little further if you made the reproductive rate like 3.05 seven or something like that I think it was a different number, but you just tweaked it a little bit not even to four. We're talking like oh, yeah millions of a degree Um, it all of a sudden it would turn into four

So there'd be four different numbers for that was the animal population And then we turn into 16 and then all of a sudden after a certain point it would turn into chaos Yes, the number would be everything at once all over the place just totally random numbers that it oscillated between Yeah, but in all that chaos there would be periods of stability Right you push it a little further and all of a sudden it would just go to two again Yeah, but beyond that it didn't go back to the original two numbers it went to another two So if you looked at it on a graph it went line divided into two divided into four eight sixteen chaos two

Four sixteen two four eight sixteen chaos. Yeah all before you even got to the number four of the reproductive rate Yeah, and he was working with mr. York because he was a little confounded. So he was a mathematician buddy of his James York from the University of Maryland. So they worked together on this In 1975 they co-authored a paper called period three implies chaos And man finally somebody said the word. Yeah, I kept thinking it was all these other people Yeah, and this this paper where they first debuted the the name chaos Um They based it

Tom Yorkstead based it on Edward Lawrence's paper. Yeah, he was like, you know what? I have a feeling this has something to do with the Lawrence attractor. So that um that That provided chaos to the world and it it was the basically the third The third time a scientist had said Um, we don't understand the universe like we think we do. Yeah, and determinism is based on an illusion Like don't you get it of order? Yeah in a really chaotic universe and this uh, this established chaos It took off like a rocket in the 80s and the 90s, you know, as you know from Jurassic Park

Chaos was everything everybody's like chaos. This is totally awesome. It's the new frontier of science Yeah, and then it just went it just went away and a lot of people said well, uh, it was a little overhyped But I think more than anything And I think this is kind of the current understanding of chaos because it didn't actually go away It became a deeper and deeper field as you'll see. Um People mistook what chaos meant. It wasn't the a New the new type of science. Yeah, it was a new understanding of the universe It was saying like yes, you can still use Newtonian physics. Yeah, like don't throw everything out the window

No, you can still try and predict weather and still try and build more accurate instruments Right and get you know decent results, but you can't with absolute perfection 100 predict right complex systems like determinism the the ultimate goal of determinism is false It can never be it can never be done because we can't have an infinitely precise measurement for every variable or any variable Therefore, we can't predict these outcomes, right? So you would expect science to be like, what's the point? Yeah, what's the point of anything? No, not science. Well, some some chaos people have said no, this is this is great. This is good We'll take this we'll take the universe as it is rather than trying to force it into our pretty little equations And saying like if the ocean temperature is this at this time of year

And the fish population is this at that time then this is how many offspring this fish stock this fish population is going to have Yeah Say okay, here is the fish population here is the ocean temperature here are all these other variables Let's feed it into a model and see what happens not This is going to happen right what happens instead and this is kind of the understanding of chaos theory now It's taking raw data as much data as you can possibly get your hands on as precise data as you could possibly get your hands on And just feeding it into a model and seeing what patterns emerge rather than making assumptions It's saying what's the outcome what comes out of this model? Yeah, and that's why like

When you see some things like, you know 50 years ago, they predicted this animal would be extinct and it's not Well, that's because the variations were too complex right they tried to predict Uh, and that's why if you look at a A 10 day forecast Usur are a fool It's true. Well 10 days from now it says it's going to rain in the afternoon Come on But if you take if you took enough variables for weather for like a city

And fed it into a model of the weather for that city you could find Uh, you could find uh a time when it was similar to what it is now And you could conceivably make some assumptions based on that you can say well, actually we can we can predict a little further out than we think but um It's it's based on this this theory this understanding of chaos of unpredictability of not just not Forcing nature into our formulas. Yeah, but putting data into a model and seeing what comes out of it Yeah, and then at the end of that you learn like when that animal is not extinct Uh, like you thought it would be you go back and look at the original thing and you have a more

Accurate picture of how the you know data could have been off slightly. Yeah, there's one value right and then you have More buffalo than you think Yeah, sure you got buffalode by chaos and we're not even getting into fractals It's a whole other thing and we did a whole other podcast. Yeah in june 2012 About fractals and the mandal been why mandal brat. Yeah mandal brat mandal brat. Yeah And uh, go listen to that one and hear me Clinging to the edge of a cliff. Yeah cliffed Man, we should end this

But first, um, I want to say there is a really interesting article. It's pretty understandable on quanta magazine Uh about a guy named george, uh, suga suga hara and he is a chaos Theory dude who's got a whole lab and is applying it to real life. So it's a really good Picture of chaos theory in action Go check it out. Okay Uh, if you want to know more about chaos theory I hope your brain's not broken. Yeah, go take some lsd And look at fractals. Don't do that. Um, you can type those words into

How stuff works in the search bar any of those fractals lsd chaos It'll bring up some good stuff and since I said good stuff. It's time for listener mail I'm gonna call this rare shout out I get requests all the time and I'll bet I know which one this is really. Yeah Dude and his girlfriend. Yeah. No So far so good Hey guys, just wanted to say I think you're doing a wonderful job with the show, uh, to the state My first time listening was during my first deployment

Yes, the one yeah, yeah when I listened to your list on famous and influential films I was hooked after that since I came back states I'd have spent many hours driving to and fro Uh, to see my girlfriend, uh, to my barracks And I can happily say that they've been made all the more enjoyable by listening to you guys Uh, even my girlfriend Rachel has warmed up to you dudes, uh, which was not a pleasant I'm sorry, which was a pleasant shock to me as she has told me repeatedly that she cannot listen to audiobooks because quote hearing people talk on the radio gives me a headache and quote Anyway, I hope you guys continue to make awesome podcasts as I'm headed out on my next deployment

And if you could give a shout out to Rachel, I'm sure it would make her feel a little better That I got the pleasant people on the podcast to reaffirm How much I love her that is john Rachel hang in there john be safe And uh, thanks for listening. Yeah, man. Thank you. That was a great email. I love that one. Glad we don't give you a headache Rachel Yeah, for real. She listens to this song. She's like, oh, yeah Everybody's gonna get a headache from this one like I came to hate the sound of my own voice from this one Ah, you'll be right

If you want to get in touch with us, you can hang out with us on twitter at sysk podcast same goes for instagram You can hang out with us on facebook.com slash stuff You should know you can send us an email to stuff podcast at howstuffworks.com And as always join us at our home on the web stuff. You should know dot com Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart radios how stuff works for more podcasts from iHeart radio Visit the iHeart radio app apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows On the podcast hey dude the 90s called david lasher and christine taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey, dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces

We're gonna use hey, dude as our jumping off point But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it Listen to hey, dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Hey, i'm lance bass host of the new iHeart podcast frosted tips with lance bass Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would lance bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do you've come to the right place because i'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander

Each week to guide you through life tell everybody you everybody About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye. Bye. Bye. Bye Listen to frosted tips with the lance bass on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts