Chaos - James Gleick [17]
Those who recognized chaos in the early days agonized over how to shape their thoughts and findings into publishable form. Work fell between disciplines—for example, too abstract for physicists yet too experimental for mathematicians. To some the difficulty of communicating the new ideas and the ferocious resistance from traditional quarters showed how revolutionary the new science was. Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. A physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Joseph Ford, started quoting Tolstoy: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
Many mainstream scientists remained only dimly aware of the emerging science. Some, particularly traditional fluid dynamicists, actively resented it. At first, the claims made on behalf of chaos sounded wild and unscientific. And chaos relied on mathematics that seemed unconventional and difficult.
As the chaos specialists spread, some departments frowned on these somewhat deviant scholars; others advertised for more. Some journals established unwritten rules against submissions on chaos; other journals came forth to handle chaos exclusively. The chaoticists or chaologists (such coinages could be heard) turned up with disproportionate frequency on the yearly lists of important fellowships and prizes. By the middle of the eighties a process of academic diffusion had brought chaos specialists into influential positions within university bureaucracies. Centers and institutes were founded to specialize in “nonlinear dynamics” and “complex systems.”
Chaos has become not just theory but also method, not just a canon of beliefs but also a way of doing science. Chaos has created its own technique of using computers, a technique that does not require the vast speed of Crays and Cybers but instead favors modest terminals that allow flexible interaction. To chaos researchers, mathematics has become an experimental science, with the computer replacing laboratories full of test tubes and microscopes. Graphic images are the key. “It’s masochism for a mathematician to do without pictures,” one chaos specialist would say. “How can they see the relationship between that motion and this? How can they develop intuition?” Some carry out their work explicitly denying that it is a revolution; others deliberately use Kuhn’s language of paradigm shifts to describe the changes they witness.
Stylistically, early chaos papers recalled the Benjamin Franklin era in the way they went back to first principles. As Kuhn notes, established sciences take for granted a body of knowledge that serves as a communal starting point for investigation. To avoid boring their colleagues, scientists routinely begin and end their papers with esoterica. By contrast, articles on chaos from the late 1970s onward sounded evangelical, from their preambles to their perorations. They declared new credos, and they often ended with pleas for action. These results appear to us to be both exciting and highly provocative. A theoretical picture of the transition to turbulence is just beginning to emerge. The heart of chaos is mathematically accessible. Chaos now presages the future as none will gainsay. But to accept the future, one must renounce much of the past.
New hopes, new styles, and, most important, a new way of seeing. Revolutions do not come piecemeal. One account of nature replaces another. Old problems are seen in a new light and other problems are recognized for the first time. Something takes place that resembles a whole