This episode was inspired by Thorton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

Grissom: Excuse me, but could everyone in this room, do me a big favor and leave, please.

Warrick: Where you been?
Grissom: I can't be everywhere, Warrick and they've banned human cloning.

Nick: You know, it's easier to get a master's degree than a parking spot on campus.

Grissom: People don't vanish, Jim. It's a molecular impossibility.

Nick: Well, I'll take prints over people any day.

Mrs. Rycoff: Mr. Grissom. What are you doing to find my daughter?
Gil: I'm thinking.

Gil: You showered.
Catherine: Thanks for noticing, Gil, you're very observant.

Gil: Yeah? Well ... I can't tell what I'm observing here. What does that look like?
Catherine: A five-foot-eleven workaholic.

Gil: (to Sara) You know, when a tree falls in the forest even if no one's there to hear it, it does, in fact, make a sound.

Catherine: Oh, and Nick?
Nick: Yeah?
Catherine: When you find the car ...
Nick: I know -- check the trunk.

Sara: Still, there's no reason to think there's a connection between the paint transfer and Paige.
Gil: No reason to think there's not.

Gil: (to Nick) Look, let's stick to the 'how' -- we'll deal with the 'why' later.

Warrick: Where you been?
Gil: I can't be everywhere, Warrick and they banned human cloning.

Gil: A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil we get a hurricane of the coast of Florida. Chaos theory.

Gil: Mrs. Rycoff there is no one guilty of this.
Mrs. Rycoff: Because you say so?
Gil: Because the evidence says so.

Gil: We told them what happened.
Catherine: Yeah, but we didn't give them what they needed-- some closure.
Gil: Truth brings closure.
Catherine: Not always.

Gil: This is the worst place you can be on a missing persons ... a dead end.

The title term "Chaos Theory" refers to a set of axioms, memes, and concepts which have arisen in the aftermath of the development of computers, initially proposed in the late 1890s, but mainly starting in the early 1960s when computers became readily applied. Formerly, all the problems approched in the hard sciences were limited to special (though often useful and informing) cases, with simple mathematical solutions. With computers, however, scientists can simulate actual real-world behavior, and develop a far better understanding of the processes involved than before, which allows us to extend our understanding of things into much more complex, or "chaotic" realms. Among the chief memes associated with Chaos Theory are "sensitivity to initial conditions" (i.e., a small, seemingly insignificant shift can result in a vastly different outcome, usually referred to as "The Butterfly Effect", associating with an early problem in weather/climate forcasting which makes long-term predictions ineffective, if not impossible), and so-called "strange attractors", or points around which solutions "orbit", but not in an obviously predictable way. Chaos theory applies mainly to deterministic problems (which are defined completely by their initial conditions) yet, due to that sensitivity to initial conditions don't lend themselves to simple mathematically predictive solutions. Hence, most Chaos Theory problems lend themselves to computational analysis but not to a reduction to a few simple mathematical formulas.