Chaos: Making a New Science

According to scientists who pioneered the field, and Gleick, who chronicles their discoveries, chaos science was revolutionary. Its focus on dynamic systems, nonlinearity, and theories that embrace the irregular distinguished its work from that of established science. Chaos questioned the foundations of Newtonian science and Euclidean geometry, as well as the rigid divisions between academic disciplines that had flourished for decades. Instead of breaking down a scientific or mathematical problem into its component parts, chaos scientists were looking for how whole systems worked, in particular dynamic systems whose defining qualities were complexity and motion. When Gleick was writing Chaos in the mid-1980s, this new science was already “reshaping the fabric of the scientific establishment” (4). Significantly, the contributions of chaos to the scientific community continue to be numerous and meaningful, challenging conventional notions of how the natural world and the universe function.

From the beginning, the author establishes that chaos science was something new: “Where chaos begins, classical science stops” (3). He reviews how scientists from several different fields began to examine “the irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side,” noting that previously “these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities” (3). In contrast, chaos theory welcomed these confounding puzzle pieces, partly because it was invested in examining entire phenomena rather than disparate elements. In addition, it investigated the material world—which humans readily recognize—as well as the theoretical plane; thus, it considered clouds as important as galaxies. Advocates of chaos science argued that after relativity and quantum physics, chaos constituted the “third great revolution” (6) in 20th-century scientific knowledge. Revolutions depend as much on defying a discipline’s foundations as establishing a new vision.

In the spirit of Thomas S. Kuhn, Gleick maintains that “[a] new science arises out of one that has reached a dead end” (37). The great failure within the scientific community that chaos scientists identified was “how tightly compartmentalized” it had become. This compartmentalization bred a narrow vision of how natural systems work: Looking only at cordoned-off parts of a system provides only a partial view of how that system functions. Both abstract mathematics and material physics are necessary to fully comprehend a dynamic system, for example. While this was revolutionary in the context of 20th-century science and academia, it echoed a wisdom that came out of the ancient maxim not to miss the forest for the trees. If looking too closely at the parts (the trees), one cannot grasp the nature of the whole (the forest). Chaos broadened the scientific view.

While chaos expanded the field of study, it refined some of the standard explanations of natural phenomena. Science does not develop, as the author emphasizes, along linear lines; it does not follow a clear teleological trajectory of discovery followed by progress. Chaos theory exemplified this trend: “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” (181). Chaos, like other revolutionary leaps in knowledge, emerged out of discoveries and mistakes, missteps and accidents, looping back on itself to clarify old ideas by using new technologies. Through its development across several disciplines, chaos began to change some of the “fundamental rule[s]” (226), as in Mandelbrot’s fractals. Basically, chaos changed the understanding of Euclidean geometry, while also relying on its foundations to make innovative intellectual leaps. It repeated this feat through its applications in various other fields.

Of course, as a new scientific field emerges, it experiences growing pains: The precepts of chaos were sometimes questioned; its methods were occasionally dismissed; and its ideas were not immediately accepted. The name itself inspired controversy. Even as Gleick wrote his book, after chaos had established itself as a specific discipline, “no one could quite agree on the word itself” (306). The scientists still working in earnest to legitimize the field worried that “chaos” could not express the fullness of their enterprise. The name stuck, however, and the author tries his best to define it in its entirety: “Physicist or biologist or mathematician, they believed that […] whatever their particular field, their task was to understand complexity itself” (307). It could even, as many chaos scientists believed, expand the understanding of the most complex idea in scientific history: the origins and evolution of life itself. As Norman Packard affirms, “Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm: now billions of years later here we are” (261). Out of chaos arises the most complex order of all.