The chaos can act as a magnifier of quantum fluctuations so that they can produce sizable effects in the world around us. But we know that that can happen often. - Murray Gell-Mann
I guess the idea is that if you have a collection of particles in a system that displays sensitive initial dependence, then any quantum jiggling gets rapidly amplified.
[edit] As you note this doesn't explain the chaos phenomena, because a stable dynamic system would squelch any quantum weirdness rather than amplify it.
yes, chaos theory, including strange attractors, is still deterministic. it acts at a level where the tiny probabalistic effects of a multitude of tiny particles cancel out in ways to miraculously make the larger subjects of interest predictable.
it's the same phenomenon underlying the wisdom of crowds (and the pricing function in fair markets): each individual can be wildly incorrect in an observation, but averaging many (independent) observations together reveals stable insight.
The chaos can act as a magnifier of quantum fluctuations so that they can produce sizable effects in the world around us. But we know that that can happen often. - Murray Gell-Mann
I guess the idea is that if you have a collection of particles in a system that displays sensitive initial dependence, then any quantum jiggling gets rapidly amplified.
[edit] As you note this doesn't explain the chaos phenomena, because a stable dynamic system would squelch any quantum weirdness rather than amplify it.