Chaos - James Gleick [113]
The Dynamical Systems Collective
Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.
—THOMAS S. KUHN
SANTA CRUZ was the newest campus in the University of California system, carved into storybook scenery an hour south of San Francisco, and people sometimes said that it looked more like a national forest than a college. The buildings were nestled among redwoods, and, in the spirit of the time, the planners endeavored to leave every tree standing. Little footpaths ran from place to place. The whole campus lay atop a hill, so that every so often you would happen upon the view south across the sparkling waves of Monterey Bay. Santa Cruz opened in 1966, and within a few years it became, briefly, the most selective of the California campuses. Students associated it with many of the icons of the intellectual avant-garde: Norman O. Brown, Gregory Bateson, and Herbert Marcuse lectured there, and Tom Lehrer sang. The school’s graduate departments, building from scratch, began with an ambivalent outlook, and physics was no exception. The faculty—about fifteen physicists—was energetic and mostly young, suited to the mix of bright nonconformists attracted to Santa Cruz. They were influenced by the free-thinking ideology of the time; yet they also, the physicists, looked southward toward Caltech and realized that they needed to establish standards and demonstrate their seriousness.
One graduate student whose seriousness no one doubted was Robert Stetson Shaw, a bearded Boston native and Harvard graduate, the oldest of six children of a doctor and a nurse, who in 1977 was about to turn thirty-one years old. That made him a little older than most graduate students, his Harvard career having been interrupted several times for Army service, commune living, and other impromptu experiences somewhere between those extremes. He did not know why he came to Santa Cruz. He had never seen the campus, although he had seen a brochure, with pictures of the redwoods and language about trying new educational philosophies. Shaw was quiet—shy, in a forceful sort of way. He was a good student, and he had reached a point just, a few months away from completing his doctoral thesis on superconductivity. No one was particularly concerned that he was wasting time downstairs in the physics building playing with an analog computer.
The education of a physicist depends on a system of mentors and protégés. Established professors get research assistants to help with laboratory work or tedious calculations. In return the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows get shares of their professors’ grant money and bits of publication credit. A good mentor helps his student choose problems that will be both manageable and fruitful. If the relationship prospers, the professor’s influence helps his protégé find employment. Often their names will be forever linked. When a science does not yet exist, however, few people are ready to teach it. In 1977 chaos offered no mentors. There were no classes in chaos, no centers for nonlinear studies and complex systems research, no chaos textbooks, nor even a chaos journal.
WILLIAM BURKE, A SANTA CRUZ COSMOLOGIST and relativist, ran into his friend Edward A. Spiegel, an astrophysicist, at one o’clock in the morning in the lobby of a Boston hotel, where they were attending a conference on general relativity. “Hey, I’ve just been listening to the Lorenz attractor,” Spiegel said. Spiegel had transmuted this emblem of chaos, using some impromptu circuitry connected to a hi-fi set, into a looping slide-whistle antimelody. He brought Burke into the bar for a drink and explained.
Spiegel knew Lorenz personally, and he had known about chaos since the