Chaos: Making a New Science

The Dynamical Systems Collective, sometimes called the Chaos Cabal, consisted of a group of physicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz—Robert Shaw, J. Doyne Farmer, Norman Packard, and James Crutchfield—who became pioneers in the field of chaos science. They were interested in this emerging field that was neither purely mathematics nor standard physics. Questions arose as to whether this new field was really science. Neither doctorates nor specific jobs were available in the field. Still, the idea that randomness could exist within deterministic systems, and vice versa, attracted them. Farmer suggested that the field might propose answers to philosophical questions as well.

To turn these various ideas about chaos into an academic program, they decided to investigate the possibility of whether unpredictability itself could be measured. By employing the Lyapunov exponent, an imported Russian idea that calculates the impacts of “stretching, contracting and folding in the phase space of an attractor” (253). They discovered that both randomness and stability could be identified and measured. This discovery led to the subfield of “information theory,” which, despite the name, describes “neither knowledge nor meaning” but rather what can be transmitted accurately across systems (255). This way of examining information looked at the random noise within such transmissions as much as the decipherable bits.