No Rules

I think we don't have to understand chaos theory for we feel it every moment. Nothing in this universe exists on its own. Everything is connected with each other. It could be a physical connection or simply through gravity. However, the complexity of these connections is so high that we cannot predict the impact of these connections for sure. 

For example, I am sitting here. I am connected directly with the chair (which in turn is connected with the floor and the floor is connected.....), the air I inhale, the light I see, the object I touch and so on. The chair, the air and the object are composed the millions of particles and atoms which are interconnected. The light is composed of photons or EM waves - only god knows what exactly is. The chair in which I am sitting suddenly collapses - apparently because it is quite old. But why should it fall down exactly at this moment? Could I have predicted this by measuring its age, tensile strength, shear, my weight, etc? Impossible. Perhaps I could at the most have predicted that it is 'likely' to collapse any time from this day to another three years, but never the exact time. Why? Because it depends on many other 'connections' whose impact I will never be able to calculate. If I start measuring I will see only a chaos. May be finally just a simple jerk of an atom in the chair at the 'right' time has lead to the collapse. 

Poet Iqbal wrote, "Who knows? Plucking a flower in my garden may cause a star in the sky to burst". True. Each action in this universe will have some impact and initiate a chain of actions. That is how the whole universe functions. To say mathematically, try drawing two lines originating from a dot with the deviation of just 0.1 degree from each other. As the length of the lines increase you will see a wide gap between both the lines. Though the initial gap is just one or two millimetres, it may lead to kilometres distance between the lines if you keep extending the lines over a period of time. The impact of simple deviation at the staring point is multiplied drastically. Similarly a simple flapping of a butterfly's wing at this moment produces a small wave in the atmosphere. However, over a period of time it may diverge into a Tsunami. Or, it may not. But we cannot rule out the possibility. Heard the butterfly example in Kamal Hasan's Dasavatharam? It is actually an example said by a mathematician, Edward Lorenz. 

Adam used to sleep under a coconut tree in Eden garden keeping his head towards North direction. Since some ant tasted his scalp, he changed his position and kept his head towards the south direction. On that day, a giant coconut fell over his legs. Had the ant did not bite him on that day, I would not be writing about chaos theory today. Small bite, humanity was saved. Even god is not aware of this fact. (Do you know that coconut never falls on head?!)

I like this chaos theory. We live dangerously. No rules apply here.