Chaos - James Gleick [75]
His father was a chemist who worked for the Port of New York Authority and later for Clairol. His mother taught in the city’s public schools. Mitchell first decided to become an electrical engineer, a sort of professional known in Brooklyn to make a good living. Later he realized that what he wanted to know about a radio was more likely to be found in physics. He was one of a generation of scientists raised in the outer boroughs of New York who made their way to brilliant careers via the great public high schools—in his case, Samuel J. Tilden—and then City College.
Growing up smart in Brooklyn was in some measure a matter of steering an uneven course between the world of mind and the world of other people. He was immensely gregarious when very young, which he regarded as a key to not being beaten up. But something clicked when he realized he could learn things. He became more and more detached from his friends. Ordinary conversation could not hold his interest. Sometime in his last year of college, it struck him that he had missed his adolescence, and he made a deliberate project out of regaining touch with humanity. He would sit silently in the cafeteria, listening to students chatting about shaving or food, and gradually he relearned much of the science of talking to people.
He graduated in 1964 and went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he got his doctorate in elementary particle physics in 1970. Then he spent a fruitless four years at Cornell and at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute—fruitless, that is, in terms of the steady publication of work on manageable problems that is essential for a young university scientist. Postdocs were supposed to produce papers. Occasionally an advisor would ask Feigenbaum what had happened to some problem, and he would say, “Oh, I understood it.”
Newly installed at Los Alamos, Carruthers, a formidable scientist in his own right, prided himself on his ability to spot talent. He looked not for intelligence but for a sort of creativity that seemed to flow from some magic gland. He always remembered the case of Kenneth Wilson, another soft-spoken Cornell physicist who seemed to be producing absolutely nothing. Anyone who talked to Wilson for long realized that he had a deep capacity for seeing into physics. So the question of Wilson’s tenure became a subject of serious debate. The physicists willing to gamble on his unproven potential prevailed—and it was as if a dam burst. Not one but a flood of papers came forth from Wilson’s desk drawers, including work that won him the Nobel Prize in 1982.
Wilson’s great contribution to physics, along with work by two other physicists, Leo Kadanoff and Michael Fisher, was an important ancestor of chaos theory. These men, working independently, were all thinking in different ways about what happened in phase transitions. They were studying the behavior of matter near the point where it changes from one state to another—from liquid to gas, or from unmagnetized to magnetized. As singular boundaries between two realms of existence, phase transitions tend to be highly nonlinear in their mathematics. The smooth and predictable behavior of matter in any one phase tends to be little help in understanding the transitions. A pot of water on the stove heats up in a regular way until it reaches the boiling point. But then the change in temperature pauses while something quite interesting happens at the molecular interface between liquid and gas.
As Kadanoff viewed the problem in the 1960s, phase transitions pose an intellectual puzzle. Think of a block of metal being magnetized. As it goes into an ordered state, it must make a decision. The magnet can be oriented one way or the other. It is free to choose. But each tiny piece of the metal must make