Chaos: Making a New Science

The book opens at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was created and tested by illustrious scientists including J. Robert Oppenheimer. Here, physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum began thinking about the problem of chaos. The author notes that, in addition to physicists, many other kinds of scientists—mathematicians, biologists, and chemists among them—also began to contemplate the problem of chaos in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, the field of chaos had gained a foothold within the scientific establishment.

In contrast to earlier forms of scientific inquiry, chaos sought to examine the whole rather than to break down problems into constituent parts. Thus, the field was ideal for interdisciplinary study and, according to the author, created a revolution in how science was done. Instead of looking only at theoretical models or mathematical abstractions, scientists working with chaos observed real-world phenomenon with the same interest and rigor.

On an early computer, meteorologist Edward Lorenz created a weather simulation that generated interest among his colleagues, though it did not quite capture the weather as it actually behaved. Most meteorologists considered the idea of forecasting the weather akin to mere guessing rather than measurable science. Lorenz himself understood the limitations of his model.