Chaos

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For other senses of this word, see chaos (disambiguation).
Asymmetrical symbol of Chaos
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Asymmetrical symbol of Chaos

Chaos (derived from the Greek Χάος, Chaos) typically refers to unpredictability, and is the antithetical concept of cosmos. The word χάος did not mean "disorder" in classical-period ancient Greece. It meant "the primal emptiness, space". It is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root ghn or ghen meaning "gape, be wide open": compare "chasm" (from Greek χάσμα), and Anglo-Saxon gānian ("yawn"), geanian, ginian ("gape wide"); see also Old Norse Ginnungagap. Due to people misunderstanding early Christian uses of the word, the meaning of the word changed to "disorder". (The Ancient Greek for "disorder" is ταραχή.). Mathematically chaos means an aperiodic deterministic behavior which is very sensitive to its initial conditions, i.e., infinitesimal perturbations of boundary conditions for a chaotic dynamic system originate finite variations of the orbit in the phase space; see chaos theory.

Contents

[edit] Physics

Main article: Chaos (physics)

Chaos in physics is often considered analogous to thermodynamic entropy.

[edit] Characteristics

The original meaning of Χάος /'xaos/ or /'χaos/ was "Space, the great outer void".

Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, described Chaos as "rather a crude and indigested mass, a lifeless lump, unfashioned and unframed, of jarring seeds and justly Chaos named". From that, its meaning evolved into the modern familiar "complete disorder", and the word "Chaos" is used by astronomers in Mars placenames to mean "area of disorderly faulted terrain".

Chaos features three main characteristics:

  • it is a bottomless gulf where anything falls endlessly. This radically contrasts with the Earth that emerges from it to offer a stable ground.
  • it is a place without any possible orientation, where anything falls in every direction;
  • it is a space that separates, that divides: after the Earth and the Sky parted, Chaos remains between both of them.

[edit] Primal Chaos

In Ancient Greek cosmology, Chaos was the first thing to exist and the womb from which everything emerged. For Hesiod and the Olympian mythos, Chaos was the 'vast and dark' void from which the first deity, Gaia, emerged. In the Pelasgian creation myth, Eurynome ('goddess of everything') emerged from this Chaos and created the Cosmos from it[citation needed]. For Orphics, it was called the 'Womb of Darkness' from which the Cosmic Egg that contained the Universe emerged. It is sometimes conflated with 'Black Winged Night'.

The idea is also found in Mesopotamia and associated with Tiamat the 'Dragon' of Chaos, from whose dismembered body the world was formed.

Genesis refers to the earliest conditions of the universe as "without form and void," a state similar to chaos.[1]

Primal Chaos was sometimes said to be the true foundation of reality, particularly by philosophers such as Heraclitus and those trained in Orphic schools. It was the opposite of Platonism. It was also probably what Aristotle had in mind when he developed the concept of Prima Materia in his attempt to combine Platonism with the Presocraticism and Naturalism. It was a concept inherited by the theory of Alchemy.

Chaos is also a character in John Milton's Paradise Lost.

[edit] See also

[edit] Sources

  • Thelemapedia. (2004). Chaos. Retrieved April 14, 2006.
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