Chaos: Making a New Science

The discovery cut through the heart of the controversy.

Nature forms patterns. Some are orderly in space but disorderly in time, others orderly in time but disorderly in space.

Physicists and mathematicians want to discover regularities. People say, what use is disorder. But people have to know about disorder if they are going to deal with it.

depending on how fast the puck is already moving. Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules.

In daily life, the Lorenzian quality of sensitive dependence on initial conditions lurks everywhere.

I realized that any physical system that behaved nonperiodically would be unpredictable.”

chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

Nonlinear systems with real chaos were rarely taught and rarely learned.

In return, unconsciously, he would give up much freedom to question the foundations of his science.

The spot is a self-organizing system, created and regulated by the same nonlinear twists that create the unpredictable turmoil around it. It is stable chaos.