Ilya Prigogine's 1984 Order Out of Chaos, is the best-selling book on chaos and meaning.

In terminology, chaos, from the Greek Χάος, refers to utter confusion, an unorganized state, or a system in disorder; an ill-defined term (Epicurus, 329BC), generally derived from the Egyptian concept of the "Nun", a state of primordial watery abyss thought to originate the universe (see: Greek pantheon). [1]

Thermodynamics
In thermodynamic modern colloquial terms, when queried, people tend to associate entropy with chaos. [2] This, however, is late 20th century metaphor-crossover effect. None of the original founders of thermodynamics, such as Clausius, Maxwell, Gibbs, Boltzmann, Planck, etc., for instance, used the term “chaos”. [3]

See main: Comparative mythology and religion

The etymology of the term chaos, in ancient origins, stems from early 4,000 BC mythological conceptions, primarily Egyptian, of a primordial deity (or set of deities) that personified the empty space or void that existed before the formation of the cosmos. [6] In particular, according to what is called the “documentary hypothesis”, when the Pentateuch, a Greek word meaning “five scrolls”, was written, between 1,000-500 BC, the Israelite authors, estimated to be four plus an editor, incorporated much of Egyptian and Babylonian mythology, from the places they had lived in, into the construction of the Bible. [15]

In reference to the etymology of the word chaos, the opening sentence of the 1600 version of the Bible, i.e. the first paragraph of the Genesis section of the Pentateuch, reads: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” In etymology of this myth, the Hebrew scribes borrowed the Egyptian Hermopolitan creation scheme, from the ancient city of Hermopolis, to describe the state of the universe before creation begins.

In Hermopolis mythology, between c. 3100 BC - 2100 BC, the primeval universe was considered to be comprised of four basic elements, each element having a male and female counterpart. These elements or gods were known as the Ogdoad or “group of eight”. The deities and their associations were Nun and Naunet, the primordial water; Huh and Hauhet, space or infinity (also considered as the flood force); Kuk and Kauket, darkness; and Amen and Amenent, the invisibility of the winds. [15] At some point the eight elements interacted to create a burst of energy, allowing creation to take place. [17]

Hence, through etymological-evolution, the words translated as “without form and void” appear in the original Hebrew as “tohu” and “bohu”, and those two words sometimes appear in popular writing as an idiomatic way of expressing chaos or disorder, as in “all was tohu and bohu”. [16]

In Egypt, in the Heliopolis creation myth, the universe was said to have originated from chaos in the form a a god named Huh.

In short, in the biblical-version, the four male deities have been omitted from the story but their essential characteristics have been retained. Subsequently, the origin of the word “chaos” derives from the Egyptian frog headed god Huh, and his consort the snake-headed goddess Hauhet, personifying the “formless and infinity”. [17] He is often represented anthropomorphically holding in each hand a notched palm-rib branch (as shown adjacent), the hieroglyph for ‘year’ symbolizing the passing of time (or "rib-of-time" analgous to arrow of time), where each notch represents one year.

Interestingly, then, in modern terms, we have come, unknowingly, to symbolize both chaos and the passage of time by one entity, that of “entropy”, symbol S, in place of older Egyptian-deity/palm-rib combination. One can only imagine, what we will use in another 5,000-years from now?

By the year 1440, the term “chaos” had come to be known as "gaping void," from Latin chaos, from Greek khaos "abyss, that which gapes wide open, is vast and empty" and chaos meaning "utter confusion" (1606) is extended from theological use of chaos for "the void at the beginning of creation" in Vulgate version of Genesis. [7]

Chemistry
In 1632, Flemish physician and chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont coined the concept of “gas”, as type of air having distinct physical and chemical properties, from the Greek word “chaos”. [8] He wrote: “I call Gas, not far different from the Chaos of the ancients”. [9] The particles of a gas, or of a gas, were in chaos, and gas could be a wild spirit because of its habit of escaping from chemical reactions. [10] Van Helmont called “this Spirit, unknown hitherto, by the new name of Gas, which can neither be constrained by Vessels, nor reduced into a visible body.” [11]

Into the late 17th century, debates on the overlap of science and religion, in relation to chaos (of Genesis) and the new gas theories, were beginning to erupt. In 1663, for instance, British clergyman Richard Bentley argued that: “The Atoms or Particles, which now constitute Heaven and Earth, being once separate and diffused in Mundane Space, like the supposed Chaos, could never without a God by their Mechanical affections have convened into this present Frame of Things or any other like it.”

Thermodynamics
In 1895, Ludwig Boltzmann finished is famous Vorlesungen über Gastheorie (Lectures on Gas Theory), in which he outlined a statistical thermodynamic interpretation of “molar-ordered” [molar-geordnete] and “molar-disordered” distributions of gas molecules in containers. In this work, originally published in two parts, 1896 (Part I) and 1898 (Part II), through a bit of derivation related to the logarithms of the probabilities of the arrangements of molecules and distributions of states among them in several gases, Boltzmann then concludes that:

“The fact that in nature the entropy tends to a maximum shows that for all interactions (diffusion, heat conduction, etc.) of actual gases the individual molecules behave according to the laws of probability in their interactions, or at least that the actual gas behaves like the molecular-disordered gas which we have in mind.”

“In the beginning was chaos.”

— Isiodos (c.850BC) (Ѻ)

External links
● Chaos – Wikipedia.