Chaos: Making a New Science

These last chapters analyze the coalescing of all these theories and disciplines into the new science of chaos. The “Chaos Cabal” paved the way for the establishment of a new academic field of study with its own scientific foundations and, eventually, its own standards. When the group began working, however, “[t]here were no classes in chaos, no centers for nonlinear studies and complex systems research, no chaos textbooks, nor even a chaos journal” (244). Thus, with this book, the author tracks the birth of a new discipline. In addition, he points out that the odds were stacked even higher than usual against this emerging field, as profound questions about its soundness persisted: “Was this science? It certainly was not mathematics, this computer work with no formalisms or proofs […]. The physics faculty saw no reason to think it was physics, either” (247). Chaos was truly groundbreaking and original, as the theme of Chaos: The Science of Subversion suggests. While its science was called into question, chaos likewise cast doubts on much of conventional scientific understanding.

The interdisciplinary tendencies of chaos science were part of the reason that it seemed so radical at the time. These tendencies sometimes hampered its development as an emerging field: “They [the Chaos Cabal] were hindered by the tendency of communication to travel piecemeal in science, particularly when a new subject jumps across the established subdisciplines” (252). However, this approach was also a hallmark of the new science: Working across disciplines is embedded at its very core, enmeshed in its quest to find universality in systems across fields, from ecology to physics to biology and beyond. The success of the Chaos Cabal’s discoveries was ultimately undermined by their need to publish their results in established journals. In order to be accepted, chaos had to acquiesce to the rules and regulations of the standard marketplace of ideas.

Another indication of both chaos science’s potential reach and its distinctiveness is that many of its practitioners saw within it not only possibilities for scientific understanding but also the potential for philosophical enlightenment. As Doyne Farmer, one of the Cabal’s members, claimed, “On a philosophical level, it [chaos] struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism” (251). Thus, chaos also provides provisional answers to the problem of choice versus destiny: Chaos reveals that nature favors systems with underlying degrees of order—and therefore something within nature appears preordained—but this order is embedded within randomness and unpredictability. As in quantum mechanics, chaos appears to show that the possibilities are infinite—until an actor or observer chooses one particular direction. The strange attractor keeps the system in check.

In addition, the author addresses the development of information theory and its contributions to chaos. Contrary to conventional definitions, in this context, “information” does not indicate “the usual connotations of facts, learning, wisdom, understanding, enlightenment” (255). Information is simply bits transmitted across networks, and messages with more noise convey more information, in another paradox: “The more random a data stream, the more information would be conveyed by each new bit” (257). Thus, chaos contains both randomness and patterns of order, supporting the themes of Interconnectedness and Universality: Both the Part and the Whole and Order in Disorder: The Preference of Nature. The author concludes—and reaffirms in his 2008 Afterword—that “[c]haos was the creation of information” (260). In some respects, this implies that chaos is not an outlier, a revolutionary new science that develops in interdisciplinary ways but rather that it will become a foundation of science itself. Indeed, the work of the many scientists the book profiles points toward new laws of nature that reveal universal tendencies.

For instance, chaos science has potentially profound implications for how human biology is understood: “[P]hysiologists have also begun to see chaos as health” (292). Without motion and dynamism, the human body locks into stasis, which indicates death. Thus, the fields of biology and medicine have vested interests in studying the dynamic system of the human body in all its randomness and rhythms. Chaos suggests that life itself grows out of the fundamental tenets suggested by the science: Without chaos, life does not exist.

Ultimately, the author shows how chaos has contributed to a wide variety of fields and greatly expanded the understanding of how dynamic systems work in the physical world. In part, the advantage that chaos offered was to work across scientific fields to look at data from new perspectives: “For [these scientists], chaos was the end of the reductionist program in science” (304). These innovators wanted to understand the whole rather than the myriad parts: “[T]heir task was to understand complexity itself” (307). Fittingly, this meant that chaos developed in bursts of inspiration stymied by standard ways of practicing science; it was hampered by the complexity of academia and funding, by politics and partiality. As the epigraph to Chapter 9 quotes science historian Thomas Kuhn, “Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial” (241)—and Gleick’s afterword makes it clear that revolutionary divide has now been decidedly crossed, and chaos is one of the standard bearers of scientific thought and study.