4 Summary of Week 1

What are the implications of this week’s study of chance and chaos? Can we predict dice rolls and beat the casino? Unfortunately, probably not! While it’s perhaps achievable in theory, the initial position of the die would need to be known with a degree of precision impossible to realise in practice.

Finally, returning to the question of the stability of the solar system. Does Poincaré’s discovery mean that stability is under threat? Luckily for us this isn’t the case. Or at least, not for several million years. Although the solar system is chaotic in a mathematical sense, recent numerical integration of the relevant equations over a period of several billion years have shown that, although it is impossible to predict that stability will persist in perpetuity, the solar system is stable on a human timescale.

You can now move on to Week 2 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .