ABSTRACT
Before people can make effective use of their images or models of materials, they have to develop their own conceptual framework to accommodate those models. The nature of a material and the identity of the particular state which is stable at a given temperature can be discussed in terms of an energy model. With the state space model, the behaviour of a system is visualised in geometric form. More than three hundred years ago Isaac Newton established a model for the behaviour of objects and forces in time and space, summarised in ‘Newton’s laws of motion’. This simplification or model of physical reality is still widely used and still relevant. Not everything about a chaotic system is necessarily unpredictable. Those systems that return repeatedly to a previous state (those showing ‘eternal return’) provide the opportunity for a kind of predictability: other forms of order or patterns in chaos can be explored.
