Chaos: Making a New Science

by James Gleick

“One has to look for different ways. One has to look for scaling structures—how do big details relate to little details. You look at fluid disturbances, complicated structures in which the complexity has come about by a persistent process. At some level they don’t care very much what the size of the process is—it could be the size of a pea or the size of a basketball. The process doesn’t care where it is, and moreover it doesn’t care how long it’s been going. The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things. “In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious that one doesn’t know the world around us in detail. What artists have accomplished is realizing that there’s only a small amount of stuff that’s important, and then seeing what it was. So they can do some of my research for me. When you look at early stuff of Van Gogh there are zillions of details that are put into it, there’s always an immense amount of information in his paintings. It obviously occurred to him, what is the irreducible amount of this stuff that you have to put in. Or you can study the horizons in Dutch ink drawings from around 1600, with tiny trees and cows that look very real. If you look closely, the trees have sort of leafy boundaries, but it doesn’t work if that’s all it is—there are also, sticking in it, little pieces of twiglike stuff. There’s a definite interplay between the softer textures and the things with more defini...