Chaos: Making a New Science

by James Gleick

To researchers and engineers, there was a lesson in these pictures—a lesson and a warning. Too often, the potential range of behavior of complex systems had to be guessed from a small set of data. When a system worked normally, staying within a narrow range of parameters, engineers made their observations and hoped that they could extrapolate more or less linearly to less usual behavior. But scientists studying fractal basin boundaries showed that the border between calm and catastrophe could be far more complex than anyone had dreamed. “The whole electrical power grid of the East Coast is an oscillatory system, most of the time stable, and you’d like to know what happens when you perturb it,” Yorke said. “You need to know what the boundary is. The fact is, they have no idea what the boundary looks like.”