Early 2010 events in New York, Hartford, and Princeton

For a dynamical system ... to be orderly, it must exhibit homeostasis; that is, it must be resistant to small perturbations.

In the chaotic regime, similar initial states tend to become progressively more dissimilar, and hence to diverge farther and farther apart in state space, as each passes along its trajectory. This is just the butterfly effect and sensitivity to initial conditions. Small perturbations amplify. Conversely, in the ordered regime, similar initial states tend to become more similar, hence converging closer together as they flow along their trajectories. This is just another expression of homeostasis. ... networks at the phase transition have the property that nearby states neither diverge nor converge.