Chaos - James Gleick [121]
To Robert Shaw, strange attractors were engines of information. In his first and grandest conception, chaos offered a natural way of returning to the physical sciences, in reinvigorated form, the ideas that information theory had drawn from thermodynamics. Strange attractors, conflating order and disorder, gave a challenging twist to the question of measuring a system’s entropy. Strange attractors served as efficient mixers. They created unpredictability. They raised entropy. And as Shaw saw it, they created information where none existed.
Norman Packard was reading Scientific American one day and spotted an advertisement for an essay contest called the Louis Jacot competition. This was suitably far-fetched—a prize lucratively endowed by a French financier who had nurtured a private theory about the structure of the universe, galaxies within galaxies. It called for essays on Jacot’s theme, whatever that was. (“It sounded like a bunch of crank mail,” Farmer said.) But judging the competition was an impressive panel drawn from France’s scientific establishment, and the money was impressive as well. Packard showed the advertisement to Shaw. The deadline was New Year’s Day 1978.
By now the collective was meeting regularly in an outsized old Santa Cruz house not far from the beach. The house accumulated flea-market furniture and computer equipment, much of which was devoted to the roulette problem. Shaw kept a piano there, on which he would play baroque music or improvise his own blend of the classical and modern. In their meetings the physicists developed a working style, a routine of throwing out ideas and filtering them through some sieve of practicality, reading the literature, and conceiving papers of their own. Eventually they learned to collaborate on journal articles in a reasonably efficient round-robin way, but the first paper was Shaw’s, one of the few he would produce, and he kept the writing of it to himself, characteristically. Also characteristically, it was late.
In December 1977 Shaw headed out from Santa Cruz to attend the first meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences devoted to chaos. His superconductivity professor paid his fare, and Shaw arrived uninvited to hear in person the scientists he knew only from their writing. David Ruelle. Robert May. James Yorke. Shaw was awed by these men and also by the astronomical $35 room charge at the Barbizon Hotel. Listening to the talks, he swung back and forth between feeling that he had been ignorantly reinventing ideas that these men had worked out in considerable detail and, on the other hand, feeling that he had an important new point of view to contribute. He had brought the unfinished draft of his information theory paper, scribbled in longhand on scraps of paper in a folder, and he tried unsuccessfully to get a typewriter, first from the hotel and then from local repair shops. In the end he took his folder away with him. Later, when his friends begged him for details, he told them the high point had been a dinner in honor of Edward Lorenz, who was finally receiving the recognition that had eluded him for so many years. When Lorenz walked into the room, shyly holding his wife’s hand, the scientists rose to their feet to give him an ovation. Shaw was struck by how terrified the meteorologist looked.
A few weeks later, on a trip to Maine, where his parents had a vacation house, he finally mailed his paper to the Jacot competition. New Year’s had passed, but the envelope was generously backdated by the local postmaster. The paper—a blend of esoteric mathematics and speculative philosophy, illustrated with cartoon-like drawings by Shaw’s brother Chris—won an honorable mention. Shaw received a large enough cash prize to pay for a trip