CHAOS THEORY
Quantum weather butterfly (Papilio tempestae). Butterfly of the storms. It flaps its wings… and Freak Gales Cause Road Chaos.
Kaos,
Fifth horseman of the apocralypse. Embodies apparently patternless
behaviour that nevertheless has a simple deterministic explanation and
is a key to new levels of understanding of the multi-dimensional
universe, or so Lu-Tze says.
Rides out on a chariot drawn by a black horse which shines as though
illuminated by a red light. His eyes are black, his helmet has eyeholes
that look slightly like the wings of a butterfly.
“The trouble was that
ignorance became more interesting, especially big fascinating ignorance
about huge and important things like matter and creation, and people
stopped patiently building their little houses of rational sticks in
the chaos of the universe and started getting interested in the chaos
itself—partly because it was a lot easier to be an expert on
chaos, but mostly because it made really good patterns that you could
put on a t-shirt.
“And
instead of getting on with proper science* scientists suddenly went
around saying how impossible it was to know anything, and there
wasn’t really anything you could call reality to know anything
about, and how all this was tremendously exciting, and incidentally did
you know there were possibly these little universes all over the place
but no-one can see them because they are all curved in on themselves?
Incidentally, don’t you think this is a rather good
t-shirt?”
[WITCHES ABROAD]
* Like finding
that bloody butterfly whose flapping wings cause all these storms
we’ve been having lately and getting it to stop.
