Bay Area Entrepreneurs in Statistics

Can a system built on chaos be stable and predictable? Consider the air you breath in a large room. At any given time there is no way to predict the path of an individual molecule of oxygen but the collection of oxygen molecules in this room behaves in a predictable fashion.

Raise the temperature and the pressure goes up as long as the volume of the room stays the same and there are no open windows: PV=nRT, where P=pressure, V=volume, n=moles of oxygen, T = temperature, and R = a constant.

But what value of V would reduce our predictable system to one of pure chaos. What the gas law hold up with just, say, 5 molecules of oxygen bouncing around in a confined space?

Of course we could run an experiment and see what happens. But to do that we would have to take measurements. And because the measurement noise (i.e., experimental error) would be a large fraction of our individual measurements we would have to take many measurements. But then, that brings us back to our original system.

Or does it?

So many things, so little time...