Chaos Theory

Commenting on handling uncertainty Dake says;

'Nevertheless, the subject is vulnerable to change, the latest approach being the adoption of 'Chaos Theory'. This would seem to be a convenient concept to hide behind in reservoir engineering but at the time of writing is still in its infancy - thank goodness.

Four years later hydrologist Boris Faybishenko (1998) discovered that the mystery of water flowing through the earth can be explained by Chaos Theory. For a dynamic sytem to be chaotic it has to be nonlinear and in his 2004 paper Faybishenko suggests that;

Inferring the nature of flow processes through the methods of nonlinear dynamics could become widely used in different areas of the earth sciences.

the reservoir engineering community may not have long to wait before it is immersed in Chaos.

In the meantime one wonders what Dake would have made of the 21st Century probabilistic engineering approach.