Dynamical Systems

Cosma Shalizi says ChaoticSystems have many fascinating properties, and there is a good deal of evidence that much of nature is chaotic; the Solar System, for instance. (This is actually, by a long and devious story, where dynamical systems theory comes from.) It (Chaos Theory) raises a lot of neat and nasty problems about how to understand dynamics from observations, and about what it means to make a good mathematical model of something. But it's not the whole of dynamics, and in some ways not even the most interesting part, and it's certainly not the end of "linear western rationalism" or anything like that.