We say Chaos because we used to, we say vibration because ...?

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Heat isn't random. Heat isn't chaos. Heat is every bit as ordered as asteroids or galaxies. Heat is an illusion. Heat is motion.


Being practical

Its useful to model heat as random, so it can have its total treated as a single number.

Vibration is another common term, again being practical.

Why Chaos?

Heat was considered "chaos" by early scientists. As more was learned, that has sort of stuck. Today most commonly heat is called unordered energy, but the illusion of order and disorder is one of scale. Every molecule moves about following Newton's laws, just like baseballs and planets. We just can't see them.

Do molecules in air vibrate? No, they follow ballistic courses through vacuum (!!!) till they hit another air molecule about every nanosecond or so (at STP), then based on their speed, spin and angle of collision go off on a new ballistic course. Not vibrating, crashing.