Chaos: Making a New Science

Like nature, science rarely tolerates a vacuum. That is, the work of science is conducted within the context of cultural trends, geopolitical realities, and technological innovation. As Gleick points out in the book, chaos science developed alongside the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The status quo was under scrutiny in institutions across the country and the world, not just within the scientific establishment. In addition, the geopolitical atmosphere impacted the growth and progress of chaos theory in both large and small ways. Communications between scientists in the US and Russia was necessarily limited during the days of the Iron Curtain. Another problem was how to secure funding and equipment for an emerging field of science, dominated by the politics of the academy and its rigid disciplinary divisions. Finally, technological advancements—perhaps most importantly the desktop computer—opened up many new avenues for theoretical exploration. All of these areas undoubtedly influenced the ways in which chaos theory developed and how its scientists thought and worked.

Certainly, the changing cultural mores of the 1960s and 1970s impacted young scientists at the forefront of chaos. While none of their work was specifically concerned with war (cold or hot), it reflected the resistance of a younger generation to adhere, without questioning, to the established ideas of an old order. Additionally, some of these scientists were reacting to changing aesthetic values within the larger culture: “Often the scientists drawn to fractal geometry felt emotional parallels between their new mathematical aesthetic and changes in the arts in the second half of the twentieth century” (116). For example, art and architecture that adhered to Euclidean geometric shapes began to fade in favor of more complicated canvases and structures; as Mandelbrot and his followers suggested, “Simple shapes are inhuman” (116). Chaos was the science of the material world and the decidedly messy nature of humanity. This period saw a movement away from Enlightenment ideas about nature itself. Instead of gardens, people were looking toward wilderness. Thus, during these decades, many of the scientists doing the dynamic, complex, often counterintuitive work of chaos theory “felt that they were drawing some inner enthusiasm from the culture at large” (116), since science is practiced within a cultural context.

Likewise, science is practiced within a political context. The geopolitical realities of the day meant that communication across national borders was often stymied, particularly between the Soviet world and the West, and replications and rediscoveries were thus inevitable. Before the era of glasnost and perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soviet scientists often worked in isolation from the West (and, vice versa). Because the Soviets had a stronger “tradition of working together” (76) across disciplines, their contributions to chaos were significant. The implication is that without the impediments imposed by warring political regimes, chaos science could have grown more quickly. In addition, scientists working within the US often had to contend with barriers resulting from the rigid divisions between academic disciplines. That is, chaos scientists requesting funding had to grapple with the interdisciplinary nature of their project: Funding for mathematics originated from different sources than funding for physics, for example. Furthermore, academic norms held that scientific breakthroughs—and the papers published about them—must come from a singular researcher, not several. This was, at least partly, the undoing of the Chaos Cabal. Likewise, obvious barriers exist to participating in emerging areas of science: “No one at Santa Cruz was qualified to supervise a course of study in this field-without-a-name. No one had ever received a doctorate in it. Certainly no jobs were available for graduates” (249). Over time, however, chaos established itself as an important discipline within science, though this took many years and concerted effort.

Finally, the technological innovations introduced in the 1970s and 1980s contributed to the field’s expansion and acceptance. For example, the refinement of the telescope and the microscope increased understanding within various scientific fields, not to mention the general public: “By the late twentieth century, in ways never before conceivable, images of the incomprehensibly small and the unimaginably large became part of everyone’s experience” (116). Descriptions both “of galaxies [and] of atoms” (116) entered the common lexicon. The new generation of desktop computers, which offered greater visual capabilities and computational acumen, were particularly valuable to chaos science because they allowed for models that illustrated—and helped to prove—some of the discipline’s theories. As Gleick notes, the computer was “a device that in 1975 was rarely seen in a tabletop laboratory experiment” (131). By the 1980s, however, computers were ubiquitous in the field, as well as in the culture at large. This again illustrates how chaos theory (and science in general) grows alongside cultural trends.