5.

26 Chaos

Civilization is a race between education and chaos.

H. G. Wells

Non-linear systems are very dicult to deal with analytically so for much of the
era of electronics recourse has been made to techniques of linearization to allow
us to do the sums, but the consequence has been a severe limitation on our understanding and to generalized views that certain things cannot occur. The early
experiments by van der Pol (1927, and see Section 1.13) should have been a
warning, but the means of doing the dicult sums were not then available. In more
recent times the work of Lorenz (1963) investigating the problem of atmospheric
weather prediction, together with the availability of powerful computation facilities, awoke the scientic community to the realization that the behaviour of nonlinear systems was far more complex than realized and that they were often
extremely sensitive to initial conditions as to how they would evolve the so called
buttery eect.
It is not the intention here to provide an introduction to the theory of chaotic
systems but to consider a number of electronic circuits which we can simulate to
illustrate some of the eects. The literature is extensive and some appropriate references are given below.
There are a number of introductory papers which are helpful in gaining an
insight into this eld (e.g. Robinson 1990; Lonngren 1991; Hamill 1993). The original Lorenz equations are derivatives with respect to (time) t in the three dimensions x, y and z:
dx
 ( y x)
dt

dy
rxy xz
dt

dz
xybz
dt

(5.26.1)

where the parameters , r and b can vary over various ranges to give solutions of
interest. Robinson, for example, describes an analog computer realization for solution of the equations with accessible ranges of 1   100, 0.1 b 10 and
0 r625, though these limits do not represent any absolute magnitudes. Since
the solutions can vary dramatically with very small changes in these parameters
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