Olivia Strittmatter - Cosmos and Chaos

April 15, 2020

From outside readings 5

The link for the article will be below! At the beginning of the semester when we were talking about cosmos and chaos, especially for the first writing assignment, I found this article about cosmos and chaos. It’s very short, it’s just the definitions of what the words mean in different contexts, such as math, fantasy, and religion. I used this kind of as a basis for my readings for assignment 1 so that I had something to compare the readings to. I thought that these definitions related to our class because it helped show that there isn’t one true definition for what “cosmos” or “chaos” means, and different disciplines use the words differently. I found that it also helped me see that most of the definitions were related in some way, and that even though they’re related the definition can mean different things when used in different contexts. I thought that it related with our class really well, because we’re learning about what one definition is, for primal cultures. Then we also had to write about what the word meant to us which showed that there are different ways to interpret the words, depending on our life experiences and beliefs.


Some of the definitions that I particularly liked will follow:

  • Chaos
    • Noun. “The unordered state of matter in classical accounts of cosmogony”
    • Noun, mathematics. “Behaviour of iterative non-linear systems in which arbitrarily small variations in initial conditions become magnified over time”
    • Noun, fantasy. “One of the two metaphysical forces of the world in some fantasy settings, as opposed to law”
  • Cosmos
    • Noun. “The universe”
    • Noun. “An ordered, harmonious whole”


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