Chaos: Making a New Science

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

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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

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.”