Place: 4274 Chamberlin (refreshments will be served)
Speaker: Clint Sprott, UW Department of Physics
Abstract: As we conclude the nineteenth year of the Chaos and Complex Systems Seminar, I would like to discuss some of the lessons I have learned from listening to over 500 talks, from my own research, and from the many books and articles I have read on the subject. This will be a rather personal and subjective talk and thus probably controversial. In particular, I will argue that the feedback, nonlinearities, and self-organization that characterize all real dynamical systems are more likely to ameliorate the dire consequences that others have predicted than to exacerbate them as so many fear. This is not a prediction that our problems will vanish or an argument for ignoring them. On the contrary, our choices and actions are the means by which society will reorganize to become even better in the decades to follow, albeit surely not a Utopia.