Morning Coffee: Is Chaos Just Disorder?
Title of the lecture: Is Chaos Just Disorder?
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jure Zupan
When & where: Wednesday, June 7, 2023, at 10 a.m., Mansard (3rd floor)
The lecture by Prof. Dr. Jure Zupan with morning coffee will take us into the world of ordered, disordered chaos. The term chaos – as a complete and deep disorder first began to be used in a religious context in the ancient times because the logical explanations and connections between the cause and link of natural phenomena to their consequences were foreign to humanity. According to the more or less similar religious scenarios our material and orderly organized world cosmos was supposed to be created from a complete disorder - chaos.
However, we will focus on chaos found in natural phenomena that at their core have known physical laws that are supposed to predict behaviors what in essence is contrary to the concept of chaos. We will begin by Edwards N. Lorenz, who was the first to tackle the modern theory of chaos. Some examples of a chaotic (unpredictable) situation as generation of random numbers and following the movements and collisions of snooker balls will be discussed. Then Pierre F. Verhulst's logistic equation (model) of population development will be described. With the Verhulst’s addition of the limitation of the resources, e.g. food, the expanded Malthusian exponential model, was then able to predict the developments of populations of different types of organisms. Not only this, Verhulst's model later proved itself to be able to describe the completely unpredictable (chaotic) development of various organisms (e.g. viruses). The final example of 'ordered' chaos will be a brief introduction to fractal structures, i.e. structures represented by non-integer dimensionality. The generation of the Mandelbrot fractals based on the iteration of the series of numbers xn+1 = xn2 + c in the complex plane will be shown.
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After the discussion you are cordially invited to a gathering with morning coffee and croissants!
The lecture will be held in Slovenian.