Chaos: Making a New Science

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

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.