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

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.

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

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

The discovery cut through the heart of the controversy.

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

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

“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.”

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