Chaos - James Gleick [147]
On the collective scale and on the personal scale, the ideas of chaos advance in different ways and for different reasons. For Schaffer, as for many others, the transition from traditional science to chaos came unexpectedly. He was a perfect target for Robert May’s evangelical plea in 1975; yet he read May’s paper and discarded it. He thought the mathematical ideas were unrealistic for the kinds of systems a practicing ecologist would study. Oddly, he knew too much about ecology to appreciate May’s point. These were one-dimensional maps, he thought—what bearing could they have on continuously changing systems? So a colleague said, “Read Lorenz.” He wrote the reference on a slip of paper and never bothered to pursue it.
Years later Schaffer lived in the desert outside of Tucson, Arizona, and summers found him in the Santa Catalina mountains just to the north, islands of chaparral, merely hot when the desert floor is roasting. Amid the thickets in June and July, after the spring blooming season and before the summer rain, Schaffer and his graduate students tracked bees and flowers of different species. This ecological system was easy to measure despite all its year-to–year variation. Schaffer counted the bees on every stalk, measured the pollen by draining flowers with pipettes, and analyzed the data mathematically. Bumblebees competed with honeybees, and honeybees competed with carpenter bees, and Schaffer made a convincing model to explain the fluctuations in population.
By 1980 he knew that something was wrong. His model broke down. As it happened, the key player was a species he had overlooked: ants. Some colleagues suspected unusual winter weather; others unusual summer weather. Schaffer considered complicating his model by adding more variables. But he was deeply frustrated. Word was out among the graduate students that summer at 5,000 feet with Schaffer was hard work. And then everything changed.
He happened upon a preprint about chemical chaos in a complicated laboratory experiment, and he felt that the authors had experienced exactly his problem: the impossibility of monitoring dozens of fluctuating reaction products in a vessel matched the impossibility of monitoring dozens of species in the Arizona mountains. Yet they had succeeded where he had failed. He read about reconstructing phase space. He finally read Lorenz, and Yorke, and others. The University of Arizona sponsored a lecture series on “Order in Chaos.” Harry Swinney came, and Swinney knew how to talk about experiments. When he explained chemical chaos, displaying a transparency of a strange attractor, and said, “That’s real data,” a chill ran up Schaffer’s spine.
“All of a sudden I knew that that was my destiny,” Schaffer said. He had a sabbatical year coming. He withdrew his application for National Science Foundation money and applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Up in the mountains, he knew, the ants changed with the season. Bees hovered and darted in a dynamical buzz. Clouds skidded across the sky. He could not work the old way any more.
Afterword
EVEN NOW, CHAOS THEORY sounds like a bit of an oxymoron. In the 1980s, “chaos” and “theory” were words that didn’t seem to belong in the same room, let alone the same sentence. When friends heard that I was researching a book about chaos—and that it was to do with science—there were quizzical looks and raised eyebrows. Much later, one told me she had thought I was writing about “gas.” As it says in the subtitle, chaos was a new science—strange and alien-sounding, exciting and hard to accept.
What a difference twenty years make. The ideas of chaos have been adopted and internalized, not just by mainstream science but also by the culture at large.