Chaos: Making a New Science

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

“We might have trouble forecasting the temperature of the coffee one minute in advance, but we should have little difficulty in forecasting it an hour ahead.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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

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