Chaos: Making a New Science

“To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.”

Instead of studying elements in stasis, chaos scientists are interested in studying dynamic systems of motion—processes in flux rather than states of stability. This approach reflects the inherent paradoxical nature of chaos science. Instead of seeking simple and static solutions, chaos seeks to understand the complexity of motion.

“As the revolution in chaos runs its course, the best physicists find themselves returning without embarrassment to phenomena on a human scale. They study not just galaxies but clouds.”

Another hallmark of chaos science, the focus on visible and tangible phenomena (rather than quarks or gluons) reveals one of the underlying objectives of this field: to understand how nature works in reality rather than in theory. As such, chaos science employs the skills of experimenters alongside theorists in order to illuminate observable phenomena.

“Implicitly, the mission of many twentieth-century scientists—biologists, neurologists, economists—has been to break their universes down into the simplest atoms that will obey scientific rules. In all these sciences, a kind of Newtonian determinism has been brought to bear.”

Chaos theory disrupted the tendency within science to study the individual components of a system rather than examining the whole. Scientists working within the chaos field are interested in determining the behavior of the whole and how systems relate to other systems. This leads to a greater understanding of the universal laws that seem to govern vastly different systems.