Ada Palmer

And this is what chaos theory studies.

It looks at turbulent system and asks, what exactly can we say about it?

What predictions are possible when prediction seems impossible?

And given that history flows very much like a river, with political science studying its laminar aspect and Palmer students learning to navigate the turbulent moments, what can chaos theory teach us about history?

Well, not much, as it turns out.

At least not directly.

Chaos theory was everywhere in the 1990s.

Fractals adorn dorm room posters.

Jurassic Park explained the butterfly effect to moviegoers.

Then chaos theory largely disappeared from public discourse.

Not because it was wrong, the mathematics remains valid, the phenomena real, but because it proved remarkably difficult to apply.

A recent survey of commonly cited applications by Elisabeth van Nostrand and Alex Altair found that most never received wide usage.

The theory excels at explaining what cannot be done.

You cannot make long-range weather predictions.

You cannot predict where exactly a turbulent eddy will form.

You cannot forecast the specific trajectory of a chaotic system beyond a certain time horizon.

These are important insights, but they are negative and thus non-sexy.

They tell us about the limits of prediction, not how to make it better.

So if chaos theory mostly tells us what we cannot do with turbulent systems, what uses it for understanding history?

The answer comes from the one domain where chaos theory achieved genuine practical success.