Arts, Sciences, and Economics by Tönu Puu

Author:Tönu Puu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

5.6 Chaos and Predictability

A different blow to scientific megalomania came more recently from Chaos Theory, which pointed out severe restrictions to the possibilities for scientific prediction. Since ages we were accustomed to regard evolving systems as either simple, deterministic, and predictable, or else as complex, unknown, and stochastic.

Determinism and prediction has formed the core of most of scientific reasoning, and Statistics, and its various application kits, Biometrics, Chemometrics, Econometrics, Pharmacometrics, Psychometrics, and Whatever-o-metrics, have provided increasingly sophisticated sets of tools aimed at providing the deterministic predictions with statistically safe limits of confidence.

The ideal of a predictable system was, of course, the solar system. Despite minor, hardly observed anomalies, such as the tumbling Saturn moon Hyperion, the movements of the heavenly bodies were so stable that it was possible to make predictions thousands of years ahead, or even back, to the benefit of historians wishing to date some past event narrated in contemporary chronicles where eclipses had been mentioned. Newton, who formulated the Law of Gravity in 1687, was even able to provide complete solutions for the movements of two interacting masses by means of his own newly invented infinitesimal calculus.

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