The Emerging Science of Chaos and its Theories
The Emerging Science of Chaos and its Theories
Chaos, making a NEW science? Now wait, you might be thinking now that you are very familiar with chaos. Well, it’s been in your room for as long as you can think back and some might even admit that it’s in their minds… So what’s so very new and amazing about it???? Don’t we encounter chaos everywhere in our everyday-lives, for example if we repeatedly curse the poor weather forecaster on TV for the wrong prediction and in fact it can’t be more than a prediction or have you ever wondered who designs the beautifully complex snowflakes???? And what about the column of smoke from a cigarette which first rises steadily, but then breaks into wild swirls???
And have you ever thought of chaos as a science or theory like the quantum theory or Einstein’s theory of relativity? Probably not and this is exactly what scientists still thought just 20 years ago because the problem of chaos is a deep problem.
Author: James Gleick, the author of this truly captivating book, has actually created an account or a kind of collection of all the research on chaos done by more than hundred scientists since the Sixties. He was born in New York City and graduated from Harvard College. Furthermore, he was an editor and reporter at the New York Times for ten years and currently lives in New York with his wife and son.
“Chaos, making a new science” or “The amazing science of the unpredictable” was a 1987 National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize nominee, the famous prize for journalism and letters.
The laws of chaos can be understood in so many ways that not even scientists could agree on them, but I will try my best at introducing you to this new scientific world step by step in the presentation to come.
One way of putting it is to say that “where chaos begins, classical science stops”. But what does chaos in this new scientific sense mean?
Let’s start with how this idea of chaos arose!
For as long as the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of nature it has seen a special ignorance about disorder in the universe, like the turbulent sea or clouds that seem to chase each other over the sky, just to name two. These were highly non-linear problems and...