Seminários

 Título: Defining chaos the physics way

Palestrante: M. Howard Lee (Universidade da Georgia, USA)

Resumo: Much of what has been shown in numerical studies on chaos may be termed “symptoms” of chaos. There must be a cause or causes of chaos. A definition for chaos could emerge if these causes could be unearthed. Doing so, that is, finding definitions which follow from proofs, is the physics approach. It differs from the math approach of giving definitions which precede proofs. The field of chaos is a meeting place of two cultures. In this talk I will discuss how one can arrive at a definition of chaos through a fixed-point spectrum of the logistic map, the Ising model of chaos. This spectrum is obtained by a process similar to taking the thermodynamic limit in statistical mechanics. Put simply, the spectrum looks like an unbroken string of irrational points. It can explain the symptoms of chaos that have been observed.