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By Root 741 0

Norman Packard, three years younger, a boyhood friend who had grown up in the same New Mexico town, Silver City, arrived at Santa Cruz that fall, just as Farmer was beginning a year off to devote all his energy to his plan for applying the laws of motion to the game of roulette. This enterprise was as earnest as it was far-fetched. For more than a decade Farmer and a changing cast of fellow physicists, professional gamblers, and hangers-on pursued the roulette dream. Farmer did not give it up even after he joined the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory. They calculated tilts and trajectories, wrote and rewrote custom software, embedded computers in shoes and made nervous forays into gambling casinos. But nothing quite worked as planned. At one time or another, all the members of the collective but Shaw lent their energy to roulette, and it had to be said that the project gave them unusual training in the rapid analysis of dynamical systems, but it did little to reassure the Santa Cruz physics faculty that Farmer was taking science seriously.

The fourth member of the group was James Crutchfield, the youngest and the only native Californian. He was short and powerfully built, a stylish windsurfer and, most important for the collective, an instinctive master of computing. Crutchfield came to Santa Cruz as an undergraduate, worked as a laboratory assistant on Shaw’s pre-chaos superconductivity experiments, spent a year commuting “over the hill,” as they said in Santa Cruz, to a job at IBM’s research center in San Jose, and did not actually join the physics department as a graduate student until 1980. By then he had spent two years hanging around Shaw’s laboratory and rushing to pick up the mathematics he needed to understand dynamical systems. Like the rest of the group, he left the department’s standard track behind.

It was spring in 1978 before the department quite believed that Shaw was abandoning his superconductivity thesis. He was so close to finishing. No matter how bored he was, the faculty reasoned that he could rush through the formalities, get his doctorate and move on to the real world. As for chaos, there were questions of academic suitability. No one at Santa Cruz was qualified to supervise a course of study in this field-without–a-name. No one had ever received a doctorate in it. Certainly no jobs were available for graduates with this kind of specialty. There was also the matter of money. Physics at Santa Cruz, as at every American university, was financed mostly by the National Science Foundation and other agencies of the federal government through research grants to members of the faculty. The Navy, the Air Force, the Department of Energy, the Central Intelligence Agency—all dispensed vast sums for pure research, without necessarily caring about immediate application to hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, energy, or intelligence. A faculty physicist would get enough to pay for laboratory equipment and the salaries of research assistants—graduate students, who would piggy-back themselves on his grant. He would pay for their photocopying, for their travel to meetings, even for salaries to keep them going in the summers. Otherwise a student was financially adrift. This was the system from which Shaw, Farmer, Packard, and Crutchfield now cut themselves off.

When certain kinds of electronic equipment began to disappear at night, it became prudent to look for them in Shaw’s former low-temperature laboratory. Occasionally a member of the collective would be able to cadge a hundred dollars from the graduate student association, or the physics department would find a way to appropriate that much. Plotters, converters, electronic filters began to accumulate. A particle physics group down the hall had a small digital computer that was destined for the scrapheap; it found its way to Shaw’s lab. Farmer became a particular specialist in scrounging computer time. One summer he was invited to the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, where huge computers handle research on such tasks