Upon hearing the word chaos, one's mind usually conjectures a place of total disorder and confusion. This is the usual meaning of the word in normal usage. However, there has been a literal explosion of scientific interest in chaos and how to control it or at least understand it. If the term chaos really implied total disorder or randomness, there would probably be no point in studying the phenomenon. However, in technical literature, the term chaos means something that appears to be random and disordered but is actually deterministic in nature, meaning that it is precisely controlled by natural laws. The apparent disorder arises from an extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, much like the path of the ball in a pinball machine seeming to defy human control. This paper discusses the scientific meaning of the word chaos and how understanding chaos may be of great benefit to mankind.