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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.