Chaos - James Gleick [115]
He spent several nights in that basement, watching the green dot of the oscilloscope flying around the screen, tracing over and over the characteristic owl’s mask of the Lorenz attractor. The flow of the shape stayed on the retina, a flickering, fluttering thing, unlike any object Shaw’s research had shown him. It seemed to have a life of its own. It held the mind just as a flame does, by running in patterns that never repeat. The imprecision and not-quite–repeatability of the analog computer worked to Shaw’s advantage. He quickly saw the sensitive dependence on initial conditions that persuaded Edward Lorenz of the futility of longterm weather forecasting. He would set the initial conditions, push the go button, and off the attractor would go. Then he would set the same initial conditions again—as close as physically possible—and the orbit would sail merrily away from its previous course, yet end up on the same attractor.
As a child, Shaw had illusions of what science would be like—dashing off romantically into the unknown. This was finally a kind of exploration that lived up to his illusions. Low-temperature physics was fun from a tinkerer’s point of view, with plenty of plumbing and big magnets, liquid helium and dials. But for Shaw it was leading nowhere. Soon he moved the analog computer upstairs, and the room was never used for superconductivity again.
“ALL YOU HAVE TO DO is put your hands on these knobs, and suddenly you are exploring in this other world where you are one of the first travelers and you don’t want to come up for air,” said Ralph Abraham, a professor of mathematics who dropped by in the early days to watch the Lorenz attractor in motion. He had been with Steve Smale in the most glorious early days at Berkeley, and so he was one of very few members of the Santa Cruz faculty with a background that would let him grasp the significance of Shaw’s game-playing. His first reaction was astonishment at the speed of the display—and Shaw pointed out that he was using extra capacitors to keep it from running even faster. The attractor was robust, too. The imprecision of the analog circuitry proved that—the tuning and tweaking of knobs did not make the attractor vanish, did not turn it into something random, but turned it or bent it in ways that slowly began to make sense. “Rob had the spontaneous experience where a little exploration reveals all the secrets,” Abraham said. “All the important concepts—the Lyapunov exponent, the fractal dimension—would just naturally occur to you. You would see it and start exploring.”
Was this science? It certainly was not mathematics, this computer work with no formalisms or proofs, and no amount of sympathetic encouragement from people like Abraham could change that. The physics faculty saw no reason to think it was physics, either. Whatever it was, it drew an audience. Shaw usually left his door open, and it happened that the entrance to the physics department was just across the hall. The foot traffic was considerable. Before long, he found himself with company.
The group that came to call itself the Dynamical Systems Collective—others sometimes called it the Chaos Cabal—depended on Shaw as its quiet center. He suffered from a certain diffidence in putting his ideas forward in the academic marketplace; fortunately for him, his new associates had no such problem. They, meanwhile, often returned to his steady vision of how to carry out an unplanned program of exploring an unrecognized science.
Doyne Farmer, a tall, angular, and sandy-haired Texas native, became the group’s most articulate spokesman. In 1977 he was twenty-four years old, all energy and enthusiasm, a machine for ideas. Those who met him sometimes suspected at first that he was all hot air.