Free Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles) by Jeffrey A. Carver Page B
Authors: Jeffrey A. Carver
No, I mean the science of chaos. >>
/Oh. Not too much. What should I know about it?/
——
The explanation came in streams and waves, curling around him like breakers rolling in upon a shore...
The dynamical theories of chaos were the only practical means of describing many kinds of natural events, of illuminating past and present patterns, and of predicting future patterns of similar events. Among the subjects described by chaos theory were fluid turbulence, atmospheric weather patterns, the movements of particles, of individual lives, of planetary bodies in orbit...and even the social forces that swirled through crisis upon crisis in the history of any civilization, including Earth's. It was the last two of these subjects that had drawn the sharpest attention of the translator.
It was the study of the chaotic patterns of orbital resonance in the solar system that made the translator suspect, long ago, that the Earth might one day be in trouble.
How's that? whispered Bandicut.
Let the stream carry you, and just try to follow, murmured the quarx.
The human science of chaos was far too immature, even in its second century of organized existence, to adequately analyze the appropriate data; and even the translator, with its vastly more powerful chaos-calculator, was still working furiously, refining and analyzing, drawing together vague and shadowy possibilities into a picture that soon would make clear exactly what would go wrong, and where...and what must be done...
Charlie...? I'm not...
Take an example, murmured the quarx. Motions of particles in a cloud of smoke—or in the rings around a planet, a planet such as Neptune, or Saturn. All the particles followed known physical laws of motion. But the motions were too hopelessly complex, viewed from a perspective of close detail, for predictions of any individual particle's motion to be useful. The tiniest perturbation of an orbit in one place could cause a drastic change in a particle's path elsewere; and every particle exerted some degree of force on every other particle, so if you were trying to predict a particle's path with any precision, taking into account the millions of moving bodies and fluctuating conditions...
It was impossible—unless you employed truly advanced chaos dynamics, such as the calculations used by the translator. And even then, working out general patterns of orbital resonance and the stability and instability of orbits was one thing, but the raw-data requirement for tracking where one individual particle might get flung out of its orbit like a bullet was truly staggering, and best represented this way:
An image flicked into existence, showing a series of hollow, transparent, concentric tori, colored various shades of green, blue, orange, and red. Waves of distortion began rippling through the donuts, and then kinks appeared as resonant instabilities, and then the tori opened up like onion shells and twisted like bizarre Möbius strips, and shredded into four-dimensional ferns...
I am not following this, not at all—
——
The image vanished, and Bandicut let out a long breath. /Now, that sure was helpful./ He sensed frustration coming from the quarx.
>> I don't expect you to follow the actual math, John. But I was trying to let you see the general outline of the problem, and the solution process. The translator, to put it very simply, is making n-dimensional phase-space analyses of the movements of objects in your solar system... >>
/That's putting it simply—?/ Bandicut asked, but the quarx continued without missing a beat.
>> ...including those at the outer periphery, not just in the Kuiper Belt, but in what you call the Oort Cloud... >>
/Kuiper Belt? Oort Cloud? There's nothing but empty space there, and a few zillion comets./
>> Precisely. Plus some dark planets which you haven't discovered yet. Your science is not yet tracking the large-scale movements of those bodies, or their
/Oh. Not too much. What should I know about it?/
—
The explanation came in streams and waves, curling around him like breakers rolling in upon a shore...
The dynamical theories of chaos were the only practical means of describing many kinds of natural events, of illuminating past and present patterns, and of predicting future patterns of similar events. Among the subjects described by chaos theory were fluid turbulence, atmospheric weather patterns, the movements of particles, of individual lives, of planetary bodies in orbit...and even the social forces that swirled through crisis upon crisis in the history of any civilization, including Earth's. It was the last two of these subjects that had drawn the sharpest attention of the translator.
It was the study of the chaotic patterns of orbital resonance in the solar system that made the translator suspect, long ago, that the Earth might one day be in trouble.
How's that? whispered Bandicut.
Let the stream carry you, and just try to follow, murmured the quarx.
The human science of chaos was far too immature, even in its second century of organized existence, to adequately analyze the appropriate data; and even the translator, with its vastly more powerful chaos-calculator, was still working furiously, refining and analyzing, drawing together vague and shadowy possibilities into a picture that soon would make clear exactly what would go wrong, and where...and what must be done...
Charlie...? I'm not...
Take an example, murmured the quarx. Motions of particles in a cloud of smoke—or in the rings around a planet, a planet such as Neptune, or Saturn. All the particles followed known physical laws of motion. But the motions were too hopelessly complex, viewed from a perspective of close detail, for predictions of any individual particle's motion to be useful. The tiniest perturbation of an orbit in one place could cause a drastic change in a particle's path elsewere; and every particle exerted some degree of force on every other particle, so if you were trying to predict a particle's path with any precision, taking into account the millions of moving bodies and fluctuating conditions...
It was impossible—unless you employed truly advanced chaos dynamics, such as the calculations used by the translator. And even then, working out general patterns of orbital resonance and the stability and instability of orbits was one thing, but the raw-data requirement for tracking where one individual particle might get flung out of its orbit like a bullet was truly staggering, and best represented this way:
An image flicked into existence, showing a series of hollow, transparent, concentric tori, colored various shades of green, blue, orange, and red. Waves of distortion began rippling through the donuts, and then kinks appeared as resonant instabilities, and then the tori opened up like onion shells and twisted like bizarre Möbius strips, and shredded into four-dimensional ferns...
I am not following this, not at all—
—
The image vanished, and Bandicut let out a long breath. /Now, that sure was helpful./ He sensed frustration coming from the quarx.
>> I don't expect you to follow the actual math, John. But I was trying to let you see the general outline of the problem, and the solution process. The translator, to put it very simply, is making n-dimensional phase-space analyses of the movements of objects in your solar system... >>
/That's putting it simply—?/ Bandicut asked, but the quarx continued without missing a beat.
>> ...including those at the outer periphery, not just in the Kuiper Belt, but in what you call the Oort Cloud... >>
/Kuiper Belt? Oort Cloud? There's nothing but empty space there, and a few zillion comets./
>> Precisely. Plus some dark planets which you haven't discovered yet. Your science is not yet tracking the large-scale movements of those bodies, or their
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