|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (Viking Press, 1987) Reissued by Penguin in paperback in 1988. Chaos, the study of seemingly random patterns that somehow constitute an ordered whole, is best understood outside, or rather, above, physics. Given that this book is geared toward the non-scientist, explaining a concept that is above physics yet somehow a result of physically traceable randomness, is an enormous task. But James Gleick, former science writer for the New York Times, animates the field by introducing the scientists involved - enigmatic personalities who are as elusive as the chaos they study. Gleick opens with the story of Mitchell Feigenbaum, a young thinker whose reputation for subtle yet expansive thought had him thinking about his own "personal quasiperiodicity." In an effort to see harmonies in different frames of reference, Feigenbaum put himself out of frame by two hours, operating on a 26-hour day. During this 26-hour day he didn't think about the kinds of problems that most of his colleagues were enamored with (i.e., laser fusion – something with a defined end and beginning), but instead about "turbulence in liquids and gasses," the nature of time (a "steady glide" or a "sequence of cosmic motion-picture frames"?). "He thought about clouds," Gleick writes, and from Gleick's description of his physical person, Feigenbaum might as well have been Walt Whitman ruminating on a cloud's metaphysical existence. Feigenbaum embodies the point of Gleick's work: that the most beautiful things nature has to offer – cigarette swirls, the ecology of gypsy moths, oscillations of the heart, and scattered electrical pulses in the brain – are now not merely the province of poetry. "Where chaos begins, classical science stops," he observes, and because chaos is as universal as Newton's laws of classical mechanics or Einstein's theories on gravity "it breaks across the lines that separate scientific disciplines." This book hems in chaos, gives it a context of characters, and then lets it bleed across disciplines until it envelopes what chaos theoreticians believe chaos was designed to do: describe the whole. MORE: Gleick's Website Identity Theory.com Interview with Gleick |
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||