Chaos - James Gleick [74]
Order in chaos. It was science’s oldest cliché. The idea of hidden unity and common underlying form in nature had an intrinsic appeal, and it had an unfortunate history of inspiring pseudoscientists and cranks. When Feigenbaum came to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1974, a year shy of his thirtieth birthday, he knew that if physicists were to make something of the idea now, they would need a practical framework, a way to turn ideas into calculations. It was far from obvious how to make a first approach to the problem.
Feigenbaum was hired by Peter Carruthers, a calm, deceptively genial physicist who came from Cornell in 1973 to take over the Theoretical Division. His first act was to dismiss a half-dozen senior scientists—Los Alamos provides its staff with no equivalent of university tenure—and to replace them with some bright young researchers of his own choosing. As a scientific manager, he had strong ambition, but he knew from experience that good science cannot always be planned.
“If you had set up a committee in the laboratory or in Washington and said, ‘Turbulence is really in our way, we’ve got to understand it, the lack of understanding really destroys our chance of making progress in a lot of fields,’ then, of course, you would hire a team. You’d get a giant computer. You’d start running big programs. And you would never get anywhere. Instead we have this smart guy, sitting quietly—talking to people, to be sure, but mostly working all by himself.” They had talked about turbulence, but time passed, and even Carruthers was no longer sure where Feigenbaum was headed. “I thought he had quit and found a different problem. Little did I know that this other problem was the same problem. It seems to have been the issue on which many different fields of science were stuck—they were stuck on this aspect of the nonlinear behavior of systems. Now, nobody would have thought that the right background for this problem was to know particle physics, to know something about quantum field theory, and to know that in quantum field theory you have these structures known as the renormalization group. Nobody knew that you would need to understand the general theory of stochastic processes, and also fractal structures.
“Mitchell had the right background. He did the right thing at the right time, and he did it very well. Nothing partial. He cleaned out the whole problem.”
Feigenbaum brought to Los Alamos a conviction that his science had failed to understand hard problems—nonlinear problems. Although he had produced almost nothing as a physicist, he had accumulated an unusual intellectual background. He had a sharp working knowledge of the most challenging mathematical analysis, new kinds of computational technique that pushed most scientists to their limits. He had managed not to purge himself of some seemingly unscientific ideas from eighteenth-century Romanticism. He wanted to do science that would be new. He began by putting aside any thought of understanding real complexity and instead turned to the simplest nonlinear equations he could find.
THE MYSTERY OF THE UNIVERSE first announced itself to the four-year–old Mitchell Feigenbaum through a Silvertone radio