CHAOS : Review/Essay of CHAOS: 'Making a New Science' by James GLEICK (1987) (original) (raw)

This book describes the birth of the new theory of Chaos. This is a difficult new concept that is still evolving but it popularized the term: Butterfly Effect and introduced new concepts to a popular audience, such as fractals and introduced pioneering thinkers, such as Feigenbaum and Mandelbrot; it inspired the novel and movie Jurassic Park. This concept opens up a new view of nature: where previously randomness had to be forced in to explain the unpredictable variations, now chaos is seen as spanning both order (patterns) and disorder. Now, this phenomenon helps explain the shape of clouds, smoke, water eddies, mountain ranges and coastlines. Implicitly, it shows how Newtonian mathematics has constrained physics (and science in general) to make simplifying assumptions that enable the calculus to become the universal tool-set of the scientific viewpoint. The book describes how this tough problem was cracked by five theoreticians described herein with a novelist's eye. Key to the solution was the early use of computers to repeat simple calculations, very many times. The viewpoint changed from static 'state' to dynamic process: becoming rather than being. Chaos is everywhere, it is switching the simple mathematical models of classical physics. It is the science of the global nature of systems. I show here (but not in the book or Wiki) that this is the start of the Death of Newtonian Physics and the Calculus: a TRUE REVOLUTION.

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