Given the information in the passage, Sommerer and Ott are most likely to agree with which one of the following?

shunhe on January 11, 2020

Hi @Shiyi-Zhang,

Thanks for the question! In this passage and its questions, the word "chaotic" is used in a technical sense, not in a colloquial sense. Thus, if we describe a system as "chaotic," we're talking about "chaos" as defined in lines 43-46, and not Sommerer and Ott's model, which is expressly contrasted with the chaotic system. In general, when we have passages like this, be careful to not impute your normal understanding of words on words that the passages explicitly define and use differently. Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.

Anna20 on August 13, 2020

For this question, and understand that this also applies to question 28 - how do you understand that "replicate previous experimental results" would mean re-creating exactly the same starting point? My understanding of this passage was that, you have a space that no matter how you start the experiment, you will end up with a random result because you can't re-create the space? Where did my understanding go wrong here...

Would you be able to walk through why the answer is not A here?

Also any tips on timing - I spent 12 minutes on this passage and still got a couple questions wrong, how would you recommend speeding up?

Emil-Kunkin on March 1, 2024

To your first question I would look to the first paragraph, the passage tells us that the typical way of running an experiment is recreating the initial setup. However, the hypothesis here is that there are instances where the initial conditions are contingent, and thus what is nonreplicable is actually the initial condition, not just the causal pathway (the latter being chaos).

A is incorrect because the authors don't tell us we aren't able to know when there are fractal conditions, but rather that the results are unpredictable when we do have fractal conditions.