Weather and the Butterfly Effect

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Double Pendulum as a chaotic system

The official discover of modern chaos theory was a meteorologist, Edward Lorenz. Lorenz was playing with computer models to simulate weather. A double pendulum executes simple harmonic motion (two normal modes) when displacements from equilibrium are small. However, when large displacements are imposed, the non-linear system becomes dramatically chaotic in its motion and demonstrates that deterministic systems are not necessarily predictable. A double pendulum executes simple harmonic …