Chaos - James Gleick [0]
Making a New Science
James Gleick
To Cynthia
human was the music,
natural was the static…
—JOHN UPDIKE
Contents
Prologue
The Butterfly Effect
Edward Lorenz and his toy weather. The computer misbehaves. Long-range forecasting is doomed. Order masquerading as randomness. A world of nonlinearity. “We completely missed the point.”
Revolution
A revolution in seeing. Pendulum clocks, space balls, and playground swings. The invention of the horseshoe. A mystery solved: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.
Life’s Ups and Downs
Modeling wildlife populations. Nonlinear science, “the study of non-elephant animals.” Pitchfork bifurcations and a ride on the Spree. A movie of chaos and a messianic appeal.
A Geometry of Nature
A discovery about cotton prices. A refugee from Bourbaki. Transmission errors and jagged shores. New dimensions. The monsters of fractal geometry. Quakes in the schizosphere. From clouds to blood vessels. The trash cans of science. “To see the world in a grain of sand.”
Strange Attractors
A problem for God. Transitions in the laboratory. Rotating cylinders and a turning point. David Ruelle’s idea for turbulence. Loops in phase space. Mille-feuilles and sausage. An astronomer’s mapping. “Fireworks or galaxies.”
Universality
A new start at Los Alamos. The renormalization group. Decoding color. The rise of numerical experimentation. Mitchell Feigenbaum’s breakthrough. A universal theory. The rejection letters. Meeting in Como. Clouds and paintings.
The Experimenter
Helium in a Small Box. “Insolid billowing of the solid.” Flow and form in nature. Albert Libchaber’s delicate triumph. Experiment joins theory. From one dimension to many.
Images of Chaos
The complex plane. Surprise in Newton’s method. The Mandelbrot set: sprouts and tendrils. Art and commerce meet science. Fractal basin boundaries. The chaos game.
The Dynamical Systems Collective
Santa Cruz and the sixties. The analog computer. Was this science? “A long-range vision.” Measuring unpredictability. Information theory. From microscale to macroscale. The dripping faucet. Audiovisual aids. An era ends.
Inner Rhythms
A misunderstanding about models. The complex body. The dynamical heart. Resetting the biological clock. Fatal arrhythmia. Chick embryos and abnormal beats. Chaos as health.
Chaos and Beyond
New beliefs, new definitions. The Second Law, the snowflake puzzle, and loaded dice. Opportunity and necessity.
Afterword
Notes on Sources and Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index
CHAOS
Prologue
THE POLICE IN THE SMALL TOWN of Los Alamos, New Mexico, worried briefly in 1974 about a man seen prowling in the dark, night after night, the red glow of his cigarette floating along the back streets. He would pace for hours, heading nowhere in the starlight that hammers down through the thin air of the mesas. The police were not the only ones to wonder. At the national laboratory some physicists had learned that their newest colleague was experimenting with twenty-six–hour days, which meant that his waking schedule would slowly roll in and out of phase with theirs. This bordered on strange, even for the Theoretical Division.
In the three decades since J. Robert Oppenheimer chose this unworldly New Mexico landscape for the atomic bomb project, Los Alamos National Laboratory had spread across an expanse of desolate plateau, bringing particle accelerators and gas lasers and chemical plants, thousands of scientists and administrators and technicians, as well as one of the world’s greatest concentrations of supercomputers. Some of the older scientists remembered the wooden buildings rising hastily out of the rimrock in the 1940s, but to most of the Los Alamos staff, young men and women in college-style corduroys and work shirts, the first bombmakers were just ghosts. The laboratory’s locus of purest thought was the Theoretical Division, known as T division, just as computing was C division and weapons was X division. More than a hundred physicists and mathematicians worked in T division, well paid and free of academic