And Shaw, settling on an experimental project that would occupy him for years to come, adopted as homely a dynamical system as any physicist could imagine: a dripping faucet. Most people imagine the canonical dripping faucet as relentlessly periodic, but it is not necessarily so, as a moment of experimentation reveals. “It’s a simple example of a system that goes from predictable behavior to unpredictable behavior,” Shaw said. “If you turn it up a little bit, you can see a regime where the pitter-patter is irregular. As it turns out, it’s not a predictable pattern beyond a short time. So even
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