Universality In Chaos

Download or read book Universality in Chaos written by Predrag Cvitanović and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature provides many examples of physical systems which are described by deterministic equations of motion, but which nevertheless exhibit non-predictable behaviour. The detailed description of turbulent motions remain perhaps the outstanding unsolved problem of classical physics. In recent years, however, a new theory has been formulated which succeeds in making quantitative predictions describing certain transitions to turbulence. Its significance lies in its possible application to large classes (often very dissimilar) of nonlinear systems. The introduction to this book provides an intuitive account of the key idea of phase-space trajectories, Poincaré maps, bifurcations and local universality which are common to all nonlinear dynamical systems. The 41 collected papers which follow fall into four groups. The first section is a general introduction to deterministic chaos and universality. The next 12 articles emphasise the experimental evidence for the theory, with examples drawn from chemistry, biology, optics, electronics and fluid mechanics. A survey of some detailed theoretical considerations is followed by a section which looks forward to further developments inspired by the success of the one-dimensional theory.