2 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
I think the metaphor with the park is like how your headphone cables will tangle in your backpack. There is one "good" condition. For the headphone it is untangled, for the park it is restrained dinos. Because these systems have only one desirable state, and as you can't return to that state once you leave, any change is undesirable.
Once you apply change, via motion, to the backpack, the cords will tangle, but they won't untangle. Once anything fails in the park (employee loyalty, power systems, weather, gender of the animals, etc.) the dinos will escape and reproduce and you can't get them back in their pens.
You are correct that a well designed system can handle a range of conditions. In the book, Hammond believes he is so smart and his system is perfect when he hasn't taken into account very basic errors in its design. His ego is the culprit.
You are also correct that chaos isn't necessarily a problem. Notice my original wording, the system appears to behave randomly. That is the key, chaos is an illusion of randomness.
Comment by Cosmologicon at 25/07/2014 at 19:27 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Right, you could reasonably deduce something would go wrong if you know enough about Hammond and his personality, but that's an engineering and management issue, not mathematical inevitability.
In the story, though, chaos theory *was* used to make this specific prediction. That was like the central theme.
It's chaos theory. But I notice nobody is willing to listen to the consequences of the mathematics. Because they imply large consequences for human life.... I gave all this information to Hammond before he broke ground on this place. You're going to engineer a bunch of prehistoric animal and set them on an island? Fine. A lovely dream. Charming. But it won't go as planned. It's inherently unpredictable.... We do not conceive of sudden, irrational change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. and chaos theory teaches us.