The Lorenz Attractor

"Lorenz Attractor" by J. Smith

Similar to the last one, the book for Book Club is about physics again....they are killing me! It's great stuff, but pretty far removed from almost anything I can relate to. So once again I am trudging through the book, in this case Chaos by James Gleick, at a snails pace.
Anyway in my reading I came across something called the Lorenz Attractor which is basically a graph, or model created by one Edward Lorenz, that depicts how non-linear things can behave in an organized kind of way that can be...predicable, but at the same time can display abrupt and unexpected changes at any time. It's similar to the "butterfly effect", where one small change can create (unpredictable) consequences farther down the road, but then somehow the system rights itself eventually and it starts again. It's a picture that describes chaos.
One prime example of something that follows this pattern is the weather.
For example you could say that for any August 15th (in the Northern Hemisphere) it will probably be warm to hot. And for the most part that "normally" true. But that doesn't mean that next August 15th it couldn't snow or hail. We've all experienced that sort of unpredictability. A hot day in the middle of December, or an ice storm in May.
There are lots of things that can be modeled using the Lorenz Attractor besides weather. Populations of species, the stock market, anything that seems pretty stable most of the time, then does something really crazy and unexpected. I think in my field of geology the periodicity of ice ages, and volcanoes would fall under a similar model.
Anyway, I was so inspired  and impressed by the notion that chaos could have a shape, that I decided to paint my own version of the Lorenz Attractor. The image was stuck in my head for days, so it was easy to paint. Trying to mimic the unpredictable side of chaos I didn't approach it with any sort of strategy though, I just started anywhere and kept layering on the paint until the image in front of me looked "right". And then I stopped.

The above is a 3D model I found on the internet. For a more in depth (and probably accurate) description of the Lorenz Attractor, click here, or you can Google it.