Chaos - James Gleick [87]
MODERN ECONOMICS RELIES HEAVILY on the efficient market theory. Knowledge is assumed to flow freely from place to place. The people making important decisions are supposed to have access to more or less the same body of information. Of course, pockets of ignorance or inside information remain here and there, but on the whole, once knowledge is public, economists assume that it is known everywhere. Historians of science often take for granted an efficient market theory of their own. When a discovery is made, when an idea is expressed, it is assumed to become the common property of the scientific world. Each discovery and each new insight builds on the last. Science rises like a building, brick by brick. Intellectual chronicles can be, for all practical purposes, linear.
That view of science works best when a well-defined discipline awaits the resolution of a well-defined problem. No one misunderstood the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, for example. But the history of ideas is not always so neat. As nonlinear science arose in odd corners of different disciplines, the flow of ideas failed to follow the standard logic of historians. The emergence of chaos as an entity unto itself was a story not only of new theories and new discoveries, but also of the belated understanding of old ideas. Many pieces of the puzzle had been seen long before—by Poincaré, by Maxwell, even by Einstein—and then forgotten. Many new pieces were understood at first only by a few insiders. A mathematical discovery was understood by mathematicians, a physics discovery by physicists, a meteorological discovery by no one. The way ideas spread became as important as the way they originated.
Each scientist had a private constellation of intellectual parents. Each had his own picture of the landscape of ideas, and each picture was limited in its own way. Knowledge was imperfect. Scientists were biased by the customs of their disciplines or by the accidental paths of their own educations. The scientific world can be surprisingly finite. No committee of scientists pushed history into a new channel—a handful of individuals did it, with individual perceptions and individual goals.
Afterwards, a consensus began to take shape about which innovations and which contributions had been most influential. But the consensus involved a certain element of revisionism. In the heat of discovery, particularly during the late 1970s, no two physicists, no two mathematicians understood chaos in exactly the same way. A scientist accustomed to classical systems without friction or dissipation would place himself in a lineage descending from Russians like A. N. Kolmogorov and V. I. Arnold. A mathematician accustomed to classical dynamical systems would envision a line from Poincaré to Birkhoff to Levinson to Smale. Later, a mathematician’s constellation might center on Smale, Guckenheimer, and Ruelle. Or it might emphasize a computationally inclined set of forebears associated with Los Alamos: Ulam, Metropolis, Stein. A theoretical physicist might think of Ruelle, Lorenz, Rössler, and Yorke. A biologist would think of Smale, Guckenheimer, May, and Yorke. The possible combinations were endless. A scientist working with materials—a geologist or a seismologist—would credit the direct influence of Mandelbrot; a theoretical physicist would barely acknowledge knowing the name.
Feigenbaum’s role would become a special source of contention. Much later, when he was riding a crest of semicelebrity, some physicists went out of their way to cite other people who had