Chaos - James Gleick [148]
We’ve all now heard of chaos, at least a little. “I’m still not clear on chaos,” says Laura Dern’s character in the 1993 film Jurassic Park, so that Jeff Goldblum’s character—who announces himself as a “chaotician”—can explain flirtatiously, “It simply deals with unpredictability in complex systems…. A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine.” By then the Butterfly Effect was well on its way to becoming a pop-culture cliché: inspiring at least two movies, an entry in Bartlett’s Quotations, a music video, and a thousand Web sites and blogs. (Only the place names keep changing: the butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, Peru, China, California, Tahiti, and South America, and the rain/hurricane/tornado/storm arrives in Texas, Florida, New York, Nebraska, Kansas, and Central Park.) After the big hurricanes of 2006, Physics Today published an article titled “Battling the Butterfly Effect,” whimsically blaming butterflies in battalions: “Visions of Lepidoptera terrorist training camps spring suddenly to mind.”
Aspects of chaos—different aspects, usually—have been taken up by modern management theorists on the one hand, and postmodern literary theorists on the other. Both camps have found use for phrases like “orderly disorder,” especially popular in dissertation titles. Compelling literary characters, such as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, are seen to be “strange attractors.” So are chart patterns in the financial markets. Meanwhile, painters as well as sculptors have found inspiration in both the words and the images of fractal geometry. For my money, the most powerful artistic incarnation of these ideas came in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, which opened in London a few months before Jurassic Park. It, too, features a mathematician reveling in chaos: “The freaky stuff,” he says, “is turning out to be the mathematics of the natural world.” Stoppard goes beyond orderly disorder to the tension between the formal English garden and the wilderness, between the classical and the Romantic. He is channeling the voices in this book, and to quote him here is to engage in loopy feedback, but I can’t help it. He captures the exhilaration of so many young researchers at the discovery of chaos. He sees the opening door and the vista beyond.
The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks…. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong.
The door is open more than a crack now, and a new generation of scientists has come along, armed with a more robust set of assumptions about how nature works. They know that a complex dynamical system can get freaky. They know, when it does that, that you can still look it in the eye and take its measure. Meetings across disciplinary lines to share methodologies on scaling patterns or network behaviors are now, if not the rule, at least no longer the exception.
By and large, the pioneers of chaos came in from the wilderness and took their places in the scientific establishment. Edward Lorenz, as a much-honored professor emeritus at M.I.T., was still seen coming to work in his nineties and watching the weather from his office high up in Building 54. Mitchell Feigenbaum joined Rockefeller University and created a mathematical physics laboratory there. Robert May became president of the Royal Society and chief scientific adviser to the government of the U.K. and, in 2001, was created Baron May of Oxford. As for Benoit Mandelbrot, a “Vita” he published on his Yale Web page in 2006 listed twenty-four awards, prizes, and medals, two decorations, nineteen “diplomas, honoris causa & the like,” twelve