This chaotic pendulum was at Green's Mill in Sneinton. It consists of a magnet on a rod above 3 other magnets, which it cannot quite reach. Notice that the socket for the rod is not above the centre of the magnet disc, which can be rotated.
Further inspection showed that the swinging magnet attracted to one of the magnets below but was repelled by the other two.
The magnet describes an oscillatory motion but it should never fully repeat itself even if released from what seems to be an identical position. This is what it means for a system to be chaotic. A normal orbital motion goes round and round endlessly and predictably repeating itself. The weather goes in cycles, doing roughly the same thing at the same time every year but never fully repeats itself. This magnet will always settle over the attracting magnet at the end as it loses energy. The weather often settles into certain patterns that seem hard to shift. These patterns would be called the attractors of the the system. At the moment, we seem stuck in a pattern of very rainy weather over the southern UK. However, just as I could put some energy in to knock the magnet out of its attractor state, something will eventually inject the energy to knock the weather out of this attractor and it will settle into another state.
