Caos, informazione e calore

Rondoni, Lamberto

Bollettino della Unione matematica italiana, Série 8, 8A (2005) no. 1, pp. 51-82

Résumé

The term «chaos» plays a fundamental role in modern science, but it is often misunderstood and mystified. This is usually the case for the scientific terms which, like «chaos», happen to be of interest in a wide spectrum of cultural fields. The reason of that probably lies in the fact that the term chaos is very suggestive, and intrigues scholars of both Natural and Human Sciences, who communicate with each other with some difficulty. As a matter of fact, the use of the term chaos is source of endless, heated debates even within one single branch of Physics, like Thermodynamics. In that context, chaotic motions and the associated losses or acquisitions of «information» are used to describe the transport of heat from a microscopic point of view. The related discussions are similar to discussions concerning the rather different field of Cosmology. This seems to imply that such discussions are very deep, but in reality they often fall outside the scientific grounds on whichthey pretend to be rooted.