Chaos Tamed with New Math Definition

It’s that point when a smooth river turns into a tumultuous swirl of white water, the tornado that unpredictably changes course on a dime or the wild interactions of three planets under one another’s gravitational pull.
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It’s chaos.

Although most people instinctively know chaos when they see it, there hasn’t been one, single, universally agreed-upon mathematical definition of the term. Now, scientists have tried to come up with a mathematical way to describe such chaotic systems.

The new definition, which was described in a paper published in July in the journal Chaos, could help identify seemingly smooth situations where the potential for chaos lurks, said study co-author Brian Hunt, a mathematician at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Mathematician Henri Poincaré first encountered the wild state while trying to describe the behavior of three celestial bodies under one other’s gravitational influence. Their movements proved difficult to predict beyond a few steps, and he termed this kind of erratic motion “chaos.”


http://news.discovery.com/space/chaos-made-sensical-with-new-math-definition-150830.htm

that definition isn't very good.
just reverse entropy.
and almost anything on a large enough time scale becomes chaotic by that definition.

I think it is one of those things that is defined by the inability to define it. the problem is the flip side of chaos theory which is simply we haven't worked out how to measure the variable yet, one day someone will and it will make sense. It was originally used to describe celestial movements many of which we now know aren't chaotic just complex.