After a bit of tinkering around, I finally figured out how to make this system let me post a web page at an arbitrary URL. So now I've got Chaos Theory: A Brief Introduction back up. Unfortunately being offline for a month dropped me off the first page of results for a Google search on Chaos Theory, but hopefully now that I'm back online I'll be searchable again. Which is nice, because I like getting random e-mails from people around the world asking me questions about a paper I wrote in high school. (True story: I once got offered someone's daughter's hand in marriage. I'm not entirely sure if he just wanted to get her citizenship or if he thought I was a good catch after reading the web page, but it was one of the stranger e-mails I've gotten.)
And I've got to give a shout-out to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Their slogan ought to be "helping people avoid the need for backups since 1996." Which is around when I first got this domain name, which I guess explains why my email address here gets 1000 spams a day. But I digress...
Comments
Chaos theory
I was wondering if you could clear up something for me. I am not savvy on all the theory names, and half the time in the middle of my long winded questions I see my own answers... but if one drops a pebble in a puddle.. the energy flows outwards in ripples and seems to disappear at the puddle edge. As energy does not stop.. I am curious if the energy continues from the puddle edge outward in a changed form not containing H2o, or does it double back and regroup in the center? I guess I could do this experiment myself, but my underlying question which I cannot do an experiment on is this...
If a live person played a piano, passed away and the piano could still be heard at times... did the original music notes/energy from the piano flow out of the room past the walls... or is is possible that it bounces off the wall of the room or exterior of the house and regroups in the center of the room. Maybe overtime the energy gains momentum from perhaps friction against itself so much so that it becomes audible again?
Finally is there a theory discussing the opposite of the butterfly effect... or is that called zero point energy?
The increase of the wind from a butterfly wing when it reaches the other side of the world... vs. the zero point energy of a never ending fade that without nano equipment, we cannot detect, hence labeled zero point energy? Hope you understand what I am asking, not sure I understand myself. Thanks
To answer some of your
To answer some of your questions:
Energy is conserved, so you're right that it doesn't disappear. In your puddle example, I believe that what happens as time continues is the following:
The problem with your second question (about the piano) is that waves don't propagate forever: as they're traveling through a medium, they lose energy by transmitting some of their energy to that medium. A sound wave is just a wave traveling through the air, causing air molecules to vibrate; as it does this, it's losing some of its energy to the air. Eventually, the magnitude of the sound wave becomes low enough that it's impossible to hear any more. Eventually the wave's magnitude will be small enough that the random oscillations of air molecules will be larger than the sound wave itself, and it will be swallowed up even if there is no ambient noise.
In theory I think it's possible for sound to somehow spontaneously get produced, but in practice I think that's so unlikely to ever occur that it's better to just say that it's never going to happen.
I think that what you might be asking is how the organized forms of energy in the universe end up losing their form and order, and the answer to that is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that in any closed system, entropy is always increasing. Energy is never really "lost", but the sort of low-level random oscillations of matter aren't a particularly useful form of energy and can't easily be converted to useful forms of energy (without losing additional energy as a side effect), which I think is what you might be trying to get at with your phrase "zero point energy".
If I understand what you're asking correctly.