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By Root 739 0

of systems, it has brought together thinkers from fields that had been widely separated. “Fifteen years ago, science was heading for a crisis of increasing specialization,” a Navy official in charge of scientific financing remarked to an audience of mathematicians, biologists, physicists, and medical doctors. “Dramatically, that specialization has reversed because of chaos.” Chaos poses problems that defy accepted ways of working in science. It makes strong claims about the universal behavior of complexity. The first chaos theorists, the scientists who set the discipline in motion, shared certain sensibilities. They had an eye for pattern, especially pattern that appeared on different scales at the same time. They had a taste for randomness and complexity, for jagged edges and sudden leaps. Believers in chaos—and they sometimes call themselves believers, or converts, or evangelists—speculate about determinism and free will, about evolution, about the nature of conscious intelligence. They feel that they are turning back a trend in science toward reductionism, the analysis of systems in terms of their constituent parts: quarks, chromosomes, or neurons. They believe that they are looking for the whole.

The most passionate advocates of the new science go so far as to say that twentieth-century science will be remembered for just three things: relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos. Chaos, they contend, has become the century’s third great revolution in the physical sciences. Like the first two revolutions, chaos cuts away at the tenets of Newton’s physics. As one physicist put it: “Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability.” Of the three, the revolution in chaos applies to the universe we see and touch, to objects at human scale. Everyday experience and real pictures of the world have become legitimate targets for inquiry. There has long been a feeling, not always expressed openly, that theoretical physics has strayed far from human intuition about the world. Whether this will prove to be fruitful heresy or just plain heresy, no one knows. But some of those who thought physics might be working its way into a corner now look to chaos as a way out.

Within physics itself, the study of chaos emerged from a backwater. The mainstream for most of the twentieth century has been particle physics, exploring the building blocks of matter at higher and higher energies, smaller and smaller scales, shorter and shorter times. Out of particle physics have come theories about the fundamental forces of nature and about the origin of the universe. Yet some young physicists have grown dissatisfied with the direction of the most prestigious of sciences. Progress has begun to seem slow, the naming of new particles futile, the body of theory cluttered. With the coming of chaos, younger scientists believed they were seeing the beginnings of a course change for all of physics. The field had been dominated long enough, they felt, by the glittering abstractions of high-energy particles and quantum mechanics.

The cosmologist Stephen Hawking, occupant of Newton’s chair at Cambridge University, spoke for most of physics when he took stock of his science in a 1980 lecture titled “Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?”

“We already know the physical laws that govern everything we experience in everyday life…. It is a tribute to how far we have come in theoretical physics that it now takes enormous machines and a great deal of money to perform an experiment whose results we cannot predict.”

Yet Hawking recognized that understanding nature’s laws on the terms of particle physics left unanswered the question of how to apply those laws to any but the simplest of systems. Predictability is one thing in a cloud chamber where two particles collide at the end of a race around an accelerator. It is something else altogether in the simplest tub of roiling fluid, or