Chaos

Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.

—JOHN VON NEUMANN

If the repeating behavior is stable, as in a pendulum clock, then the system returns to this orbit after small perturbations

It was locally unpredictable, globally stable

A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances.

Chaos has become not just theory but also method, not just a canon of beliefs but also a way of doing science

In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere

any physical system that behaved nonperiodically would be unpredictable

you can always try to solve a problem by proving that no solution exists

WHERE CHAOS BEGINS, classical science stops