And though I ....understand all mysteries, and all knowledge;....and have not Love, I am nothing.
1 Corinthians 13:2
"Normally the word “chaos” evokes a lack of order: ....... It’s something that is extremely difficult to predict, like the weather. 
Chaos allows a small blip (the flutter of a butterfly wing) to grow into a big consequence (a typhoon halfway across the world), which explains why weather forecasts more than a few days into the future can be unreliable.
Individual air molecules, which are constantly bouncing around, are also chaotic—it’s nearly impossible to pin down where any single molecule might be at any given moment.
“The ambitious goal here is to understand
---how chaos
---and the universal tendency of most physical systems to reach thermal equilibrium arises from fundamental laws of physics,” says JQI Fellow Victor Galitski.
Quantum particles can’t just have any energy, the available levels are ‘quantized,’ which basically means they are restricted to particular values.
Back in the 1970’s, physicists found that if the quantum particles behaved in predictable ways, their energy levels were completely independent of one another—the possible values didn’t tend to bunch up or spread out, on average.
But if the quantum particles were chaotic, the energy levels seemed to avoid each other, spreading out in distinctive ways.
*This energy level repulsion is now often used as one of the definitions of quantum chaos.
Not only did they find theoretical evidence of some level repulsion, a hallmark of quantum chaos, but they also found that some of the levels tended to bunch together rather than repel, a novel phenomenon that they couldn’t quite explain.
This deceptively simple problem turned out to be neither ordered nor chaotic, but some curious combination of the two that hadn’t been seen before.
“Our preliminary results indicate that thermalization may happen via spontaneous breaking of reversibility—the past becomes mathematically distinct from the future,” says Galitski. “We see that small disturbances get exponentially magnified and destroy all remaining signatures of order. But this is another story.” SciTech
