AS FOR ME, I never returned to chaos, but readers might spot seeds of all my later books in this one. I knew hardly anything about Richard Feynman, but he has a cameo here (see here). Isaac Newton has more than a cameo: he seems to be the antihero of chaos, or the god to be overthrown. I discovered only later, reading his notebooks and letters, how wrong I’d been about him. And for twenty years I’ve been pursuing a thread that began with something Rob Shaw told me, about chaos and information theory, as invented by Claude Shannon. Chaos is a creator of information—another apparent paradox.
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