Chaos - James Gleick [129]
By the time the collective departed, some of the Santa Cruz faculty had turned to chaos, too. Other physicists, though, felt in retrospect that Santa Cruz had missed an opportunity to begin the kind of national center for work in nonlinear dynamics that soon began appearing on other campuses. In the early 1980s the members of the collective graduated and dispersed. Shaw finished his dissertation in 1980, Farmer in 1981, Packard in 1982. Crutchfield’s appeared in 1983, a typographical hodgepodge interleaving typed pages with no less than eleven papers already published in the journals of physics and mathematics. He went on to the University of California at Berkeley. Farmer joined the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos. Packard and Shaw joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Crutchfield studied video feedback loops. Farmer worked on “fat fractals” and modeled the complex dynamics of the human immune system. Packard explored spatial chaos and the formation of snowflakes. Only Shaw seemed reluctant to join the mainstream. His own influential legacy comprised just two papers, one that had won him a trip to Paris and one, about the dripping faucet, that summed up all his Santa Cruz research. Several times, he came close to quitting science altogether. As one of his friends said, he was oscillating.
Inner Rhythms
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
—JOHN VON NEUMANN
BERNARDO HUBERMAN LOOKED OUT over his audience of assorted theoretical and experimental biologists, pure mathematicians and physicians and psychiatrists, and he realized that he had a communication problem. He had just finished an unusual talk at an unusual gathering in 1986, the first major conference on chaos in biology and medicine, under the various auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Office of Naval Research. In the cavernous Masur Auditorium at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington, Huberman saw many familiar faces, chaos specialists of long standing, and many unfamiliar ones as well. An experienced speaker could expect some audience impatience—it was the conference’s last day, and it was dangerously close to lunch time.
Huberman, a dapper black-haired Californian transplanted from Argentina, had kept up his interest in chaos since his collaborations with members of the Santa Cruz gang. He was a research fellow at the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center. But sometimes he dabbled in projects that did not belong to the corporate mission, and here at the biology conference he had just finished describing one of those: a model for the erratic eye movement of schizophrenics.
Psychiatrists have struggled for generations to define schizophrenia and classify schizophrenics, but the disease has been almost as difficult to describe as to cure. Most of its symptoms appear in mind and behavior. Since 1908, however, scientists have known of a physical manifestation of the disease that seems to afflict not only schizophrenics but also their relatives. When patients try to watch a slowly swinging pendulum, their eyes cannot track the smooth motion. Ordinarily the eye is a remarkably smart instrument. A healthy person’s eyes stay locked on moving targets without the least conscious thought; moving images stay frozen in place on the retina. But a schizophrenic