Chaos: Making a New Science

by James Gleick

That view of science works best when a well-defined discipline awaits the resolution of a well-defined problem. No one misunderstood the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, for example. But the history of ideas is not always so neat. As nonlinear science arose in odd corners of different disciplines, the flow of ideas failed to follow the standard logic of historians. The emergence of chaos as an entity unto itself was a story not only of new theories and new discoveries, but also of the belated understanding of old ideas. Many pieces of the puzzle had been seen long before—by Poincaré, by Maxwell, even by Einstein—and then forgotten. Many new pieces were understood at first only by a few insiders. A mathematical discovery was understood by mathematicians, a physics discovery by physicists, a meteorological discovery by no one. The way ideas spread became as important as the way they originated. Each scientist had a private constellation of intellectual parents. Each had his own picture of the landscape of ideas, and each picture was limited in its own way. Knowledge was imperfect. Scientists were biased by the customs of their disciplines or by the accidental paths of their own educations. The scientific world can be surprisingly finite. No committee of scientists pushed history into a new channel—a handful of individuals did it, with individual perceptions and individual goals. Afterwards, a consensus began to take shape about which innovations and which contrib...