The Daring Dufas wrote: ...
Indeed, there is a fundamental difference.
The beginning of the following link is on the line of the way I used to try present it to the bleary-eyed utility guys who really only wanted to know enough as to whether they thought it (the R&D project; EPRI is a utility self-funded research organization so we had to have buy-in from the member utilities to continue to have the resources to support the effort) made enough sense to continue or not and like you, wanted at least a grasp of the concept.
I'd not read the Wikipedia entry on chaos; so often they're not of much help so did--it's not terrible reading.
For a non-technical read if you're interested in such things, I'd recommend
_Chaos: Making a New Science_ by James Gleick
It's the best written of several of the popular expositions imo for a general overview of chaotic systems in natural processes.
For more esoteric approach, Benoit Mandelbrot is a stretch but two of his at least summarized rather than actual papers include _The_Fractal_Geometry_of_Nature_ and _Fractals_and_Chaos:_The_Mandelbrot_Set_ and_Beyond_
Of course, there's an almost unlimited literature on turbulent flow but other than how it's touched upon in some of the above as a field I don't know of any popularization of the subject itself. The pneumatic transport of solids is, of course, a subset within it with another whole literature/history...
None of those will explain the processing we're doing; but they are an interesting introduction into a whole (relatively) new way of looking at much of the physical world.
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