Chaos - James Gleick [127]
How deadly! Where’s the guy’s sense of scope? Farmer thought. “He was looking at these little orbits. Meanwhile we were into information theory with all its profundity, taking chaos apart, seeing what make it tick, trying to relate metric entropy and Lya-punov exponents to more statistical measures.”
In his conversation with Farmer, Lanford did not emphasize universality, and only later did Farmer realize that he had missed the point. “It was my naïveté,” Farmer said. “The idea of universality was not just a great result. Mitchell’s thing was also a technique to employ a whole army of unemployed critical phenomena people.
“Up to that point it appeared that nonlinear systems would have to be treated in a case-by–case way. We were trying to come up with a language to quantify it and describe it, but it still seemed as though everything would have to be treated case by case. We saw no way to put systems in classes and write solutions that would be valid for the whole class, as in linear systems. Universality meant finding properties that were exactly the same in quantifiable ways for everything in that class. Predictable properties. That’s why it was really important.
“And there was a sociological factor that pumped even more fuel. Mitchell cast his results in the language of renormalization. He took all this machinery that people in critical phenomena had been skilled in using. Those guys were having a hard time, because there didn’t seem to be any interesting problems left for them to do. They were looking around for something else to apply their bag of tricks to. And suddenly Feigenbaum came forward with his extremely significant application of this bag of tricks. It spawned an entire subdiscipline.”
Quite independently, however, the Santa Cruz students began to make an impression of their own. Within the department their star began to rise after a surprise appearance at a midwinter meeting in condensed matter physics in Laguna Beach in 1978, organized by Bernardo Huberman of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford University. The collective was not invited, but it went nonetheless, bundling itself into Shaw’s 1959 Ford ranch-style station wagon, an automobile known as the Cream Dream. Just in case, the group brought some equipment, including a huge television monitor and a videotape. When an invited speaker canceled at the last minute, Huberman invited Shaw to take his place. The timing was perfect. Chaos had attained the status of buzzword, but few of the physicists attending the conference knew what it meant. So Shaw began by explaining attractors in phase space: first fixed points (where everything stops); then limit cycles (where everything oscillates); then strange attractors (everything else). He demonstrated with his computer graphics on videotape. (“Audiovisual aids gave us an edge,” he said. “We could hypnotize them with flashing lights.”) He illuminated the Lorenz attractor and the dripping faucet. He explained the geometry—how shapes are stretched and folded, and what that meant in the grand terms of information theory. And for good measure, he put in a few words at the end about shifting paradigms. The talk was a popular triumph, and in the audience were several members of the Santa Cruz faculty, seeing chaos for the first time through the eyes of their colleagues.
IN 1979 THE WHOLE GROUP attended the second chaos meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences, this time as participants, and now the field was exploding. The 1977 meeting had been Lorenz’s, attended by specialists numbering in the dozens. This meeting was Feigenbaum’s, and scientists came by the hundreds. Where two years earlier Rob Shaw had shyly tried to find a typewriter so that he could produce a paper to leave under people’s doors, now the Dynamical Systems Collective had become a virtual printing press, producing papers rapidly and always under joint authorship.
But the collective could not go on forever. The closer it came to the real world of science,