Chaos - James Gleick [117]
The Santa Cruzians’ tinkering sensibility served them well. Shaw had grown up “gizmo-oriented.” Packard had fixed television sets as a boy in Silver City. Crutchfield belonged to the first generation of mathematicians for whom the logic of computer processors was a natural language. The physics building itself, in its shady redwood setting, was like physics buildings everywhere, with a universal ambience of cement floors and walls that always needed repainting, but the room taken over by the chaos group developed its own atmosphere, with piles of papers and pictures of Tahitian islanders on the walls and, eventually, printouts of strange attractors. At almost any hour, though night was a safer bet than morning, a visitor could see members of the group rearranging circuitry, yanking out patch cords, arguing about consciousness or evolution, adjusting an oscilloscope display, or just staring while a glowing green spot traced a curve of light, its orbit flickering and seething like something alive.
“THE SAME THING REALLY DREW all of us: the notion that you could have determinism but not really,” Farmer said. “The idea that all these classical deterministic systems we’d learned about could generate randomness was intriguing. We were driven to understand what made that tick.
“You can’t appreciate the kind of revelation that is unless you’ve been brainwashed by six or seven years of a typical physics curriculum. You’re taught that there are classical models where everything is determined by initial conditions, and then there are quantum mechanical models where things are determined but you have to contend with a limit on how much initial information you can gather. Nonlinear was a word that you only encountered in the back of the book. A physics student would take a math course and the last chapter would be on nonlinear equations. You would usually skip that, and, if you didn’t, all they would do is take these nonlinear equations and reduce them to linear equations, so you just get approximate solutions anyway. It was just an exercise in frustration.
“We had no concept of the real difference that nonlinearity makes in a model. The idea that an equation could bounce around in an apparently random way—that was pretty exciting. You would say, ‘Where is this random motion coming from? I don’t see it in the equations.’ It seemed like something for nothing, or something out of nothing.”
Crutchfield said, “It was a realization that here is a whole realm of physical experience that just doesn’t fit in the current framework. Why wasn’t that part of what we were taught? We had a chance to look around the immediate world—a world so mundane it was wonderful—and understand something.”
They enchanted themselves and dismayed their professors with leaps to questions of determinism, the nature of intelligence, the direction of biological evolution.
“The glue that held us together was a long-range vision,” Packard said, “It was striking to us that if you take regular physical systems which have been analyzed to death in classical physics, but you take one little step away in parameter space, you end up with something to which all of this huge body of analysis does not apply.
“The phenomenon of chaos could have been discovered long, long ago. It wasn’t, in part because this huge body of work on the dynamics of regular motion didn’t lead in that direction. But if you just look, there it is. It brought home the point that one should allow oneself to be guided by the physics, by observations, to see what kind of theoretical picture one could develop. In the long run we saw the investigation of complicated dynamics as an entry point that might lead to an understanding of really, really complicated dynamics.”
Farmer said, “On a philosophical level, it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going