ABSTRACT
There is a major shift occurring at the moment in our understanding of the behaviour of complex dynamical systems. This understanding usually goes under the unfortunately chosen term ‘Chaos Theory’. I say unfortunate because the basic thrust is to understand the processes and mechanisms behind the occurrence of apparently chaotic phenomena (such as the patterns of convection in boiling water, the tumbling behaviour of unstable objects, unsystematic and unrepeated fluctuations of animal numbers in ecosystems) by showing that there are parameters governing such behaviour, and that we can make plots of those parameters.
