Chaos - James Gleick [164]
“EVOLUTION IS CHAOS” “What Is Chaos?” p. 14.
“GOD PLAYS DICE” Ford.
“THE PROFESSION CAN NO LONGER” Structure, p. 5.
“BOTH EXHILARATING AND A BIT THREATENING” William M. Schaffer, “Chaos in Ecological Systems: The Coals That Newcastle Forgot,” Trends in Ecological Systems 1 (1986), p. 63.
“WHAT PASSES FOR FUNDAMENTAL” William M. Schaffer and Mark Kot, “Do Strange Attractors Govern Ecological Systems?” Bio-Science 35 (1985), p. 349.
SCHAFFER IS USING e.g., William M. Schaffer and Mark Kot, “Nearly One Dimensional Dynamics in an Epidemic,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 112 (1985), pp. 403–27.
“MORE TO THE POINT” Schaffer.
YEARS LATER, SCHAFFER LIVED Schaffer; also William M. Schaffer, “A Personal Hejeira,” unpublished.
Acknowledgments
MANY SCIENTISTS GENEROUSLY GUIDED, informed, and instructed me. The contributions of some will be apparent to the reader, but many others, unnamed in the text or mentioned only in passing, shared no less of their time and intelligence. They opened their files, searched their memories, debated one another, and suggested ways of thinking about science that were indispensable to me. Several read the manuscript. In researching Chaos I needed their patience and their honesty.
I want to express my appreciation to my editor, Daniel Frank, whose imagination, sensitivity, and integrity gave this book more than I can say. I depended on Michael Carlisle, my agent, for his exceedingly skillful and enthusiastic support. At the New York Times, Peter Millones and Don Erickson helped me in crucial ways. Among those who contributed to the illustrations in these pages were Heinz-Otto Peitgen, Peter Richter, James Yorke, Leo Kadanoff, Philip Marcus, Benoit Mandelbrot, Jerry Gollub, Harry Swinney, Arthur Winfree, Bruce Stewart, Fereydoon Family, Irving Epstein, Martin Glicksman, Scott Burns, James Crutchfield, John Milnor, Richard Voss, Nancy Sterngold, and Adolph Brotman. I am also grateful to my parents, Beth and Donen Gleick, who not only brought me up right but corrected the book.
Goethe wrote: “We have a right to expect from one who proposes to give us the history of any science, that he inform us of how the phenomena of which it treats were gradually known, and what was imagined, conjectured, assumed, or thought respecting them.” This is a “hazardous affair,” he continued, “for in such an undertaking, a writer tacitly announces at the outset that he means to place some things in light, others in shade. The author has, nevertheless, long derived pleasure from the prosecution of his task….”
Index
A | B | C | D | E
F | G | H | I | J
K | L | M | N | O
P | Q | R | S | T
U | V | W | X | Y
Bold–faced page numbers indicate illustrations
A
Abraham, Ralph, 52–53, 247, 267, 279
accelerators, 7, 115, 125, 263, 271
Agnew, Harold, 2
Ahlers, Günter, 127, 314
Air Force (United States), 249
air resistance, 41–42
Albers, Josef, 116, 229
American Mathematical Monthly, 69
aperiodicity, 12, 15, 139, 246
and life, 299–300
and unpredictability, 22
Apple computer, 7, 305
approximation, 15, 67–68, 210
Archimedes, 21, 39
architecture, 116–17, 229
Aristotle, 40–42
Arizona, University of, 317
Army (United States), 13
Arnold, V. L, 182
art, 94, 116–17, 186–87, 222, 229
asteroids, 14, 314
AT&T Bell Laboratories, 127, 208, 255
Atlantic Ocean, 55
atmosphere, 3, 11, 170
chaos in, 17
atomic bomb, 2, 7, 122
attractors, 237, 246, 269
basins of, 43, 233–36, 299
fixed–point (steady state), 64, 134, 227, 233, 237, 253, 255
limit cycles (oscillating), 73, 134, 227, 253, 255
stability of, 150
see also strange