Chaos: Making a New Science

Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

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

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.

approach. Textbooks showed students only the rare nonlinear systems that would give way to such techniques.

eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability.”

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

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

The discovery cut through the heart of the controversy.

A French mathematical physicist had just made the disputatious claim that turbulence in fluids might have something to do with a bizarre, infinitely tangled abstraction that he called a strange attractor.