As I look around my office/spare room, I see a huge pile of unsorted laundry (one that I keep adding to), papers that need filing, empty cups of tea and a dog attempting to turn the aforementioned pile of laundry into his new bed.
It is, in short, chaos.
‘Chaos’ comes from an Ancient Greek word, χάος (kháos). But if you somehow time-travelled back to the days of togas, epic poetry and gods-impregnating-women-in-weird-ways (I’m looking at you, Zeus), and told the first person you met that your office (and kitchen, and bedroom, and bathroom) was ‘full of chaos’, they’d look at you quizzically. Because to them, chaos wasn’t a mess at all. It was a big old empty space.
To find out why, we need to take a look at Hesiod’s Theogony, a 1,022-line epic poem which he wrote around the 8th century BCE. Theogony is the foundational text for Greek mythology, detailing the origins, genealogy and succession of the gods. And it all starts with Chaos-with-a-capital-C, the very first thing to exist. But Chaos-with-a-capital-C wasn’t the noisy vortex of fire, wind and random rubbish you might be imagining right now. It was, simply, DUM DUM DUUUUMMMM…
… the Void.
No stars, no earth, no sky and definitely no laundry that needed putting away. Just a giant, empty space waiting for stuff to happen. A cosmic blank page, if you will.
(The etymology backs this up – if we trace ‘chaos’ back to its Proto-Indo-European root, we land on *ghen- or *ghei-, which means ‘to gape’ or ‘to yawn’.)
Chaos gets crowded
So how did this empty abyss turn into the ultimate disaster area? Well, we can blame another poet for that (damn poets), but a Roman one this time – Ovid. Ovid took one look at Hesiod’s 1,022 lines and decided that clearly wasn’t enough. His Metamorphoses, which he wrote around 8 CE, was approximately 11,995 lines of dactylic hexameter (yum). And even though his name is literally an anagram of ‘void’, he decided to redefine chaos as a confused, shapeless mass rather than an empty space. Ovid’s chaos involved all the raw elements of the universe – fire, water, earth and air – crammed in together like a university flat-share, fighting against one another in this overcrowded, messy and disorganised space.
‘Chaos’ elbowed its way into Middle English around the 14th to 15th century via Old French and Latin. At first, writers used it in the same sense as Hesiod, i.e. to refer to the void that existed before Creation (this also turns up in Genesis, where the Earth was ‘without form, and void’). But Ovid’s hot mess was far too relatable to stay confined to Roman epic poetry. By the late 16th and early 17th centuries, English speakers had begun using ‘chaos’ to describe any state of utter confusion, disorder or turmoil.
Gus and his new laundry-based bed
The ultimate plot twist: Chaos Theory
Hesiod gave us chaos as an empty void. Ovid rebranded it as a crowded mess. Then 20th-century scientists flipped the word once more. In the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lorenz entered numbers into a computer weather simulation built on strict physical laws. He rounded one number down slightly to save time (sort of – it’s more complicated than this, but this is a blog about words, not numbers), fully expecting that doing that wouldn’t really affect the result. Instead, that tiny tweak generated a completely different long-term forecast (AKA the butterfly effect). This proved that a system doesn’t need to be random to produce wild, unpredictable outcomes – it can follow strict, logical rules behind the scenes and still create results that look like a total mess on the surface.
Lorenz originally called this ‘deterministic nonperiodic flow’ (which sounds vaguely perimenopausal) as well as the equally snappy ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’. Thankfully, mathematicians (in my head they all look like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park) later stepped in and rebranded it as Chaos Theory, presumably just because it sounds really cool.
So, the word ‘chaos’ has come full circle, from empty space to jumbled mess to structure inside an apparent muddle. Which means, as I look over at my dog sleeping peacefully in a pile of unsorted laundry, I can take comfort in the fact that it isn’t actually a disaster. It’s just a complex system with a hidden order I have yet to discover. (Or at least, that’s what I’ll be telling myself until I finally put the washing away.)
Dr Ian Malcolm using Chaos Theory to flirt with Laura Dern – much creepier than I remembered