Dancing With Myself by Charles Sheffield

Author:Charles Sheffield [Sheffield, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Phoenix Pick
Published: 2018-03-15T20:02:48+00:00

article: the unlicked bear-whelp

A Worm’s Eye Look at Chaos Theory

“So when this world’s compounded union breaks,

Time ends, and to old Chaos all things turn.”

—Christopher Marlowe

1. INTRODUCTION

The Greek word “chaos” referred to the formless or disordered state before the beginning of the universe. The word has also been a part of the English language for a long time. Thus in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part Three, the Duke of Gloucester (who in the next play of the series will become King Richard III, and romp about the stage in unabashed villainy) is complaining about his physical deformities. He is, he says, “like to a Chaos, or an unlick’d bear-whelp, that carries no impression like the dam.” Chaos: something essentially random, an object or being without a defined shape.

Those lines were written about 1590. The Marlowe quotation that heads this article comes from close to the same year, and it is a wonderful (though unintentional) foreshadowing of the idea of the heat-death of the Universe, first formulated in the late nineteenth century.

Chaos is old; but chaos theory is a new term. Ten years ago, no popular article had ever been written containing that expression. Today it is hard to pick up a science magazine without finding an article on chaos theory, complete with stunning color illustrations. I must say that those articles, without exception, have failed to make the central ideas of chaos theory clear to me. That’s why I went grubbing into it on my own, and why I am writing this, adding yet another (possibly unintelligible) discussion of the subject to the literature.

Part of the problem is simple newness. When someone writes about, say, quantum theory, the subject has to be presented as difficult, and subtle, and mysterious, because it is difficult, and subtle, and mysterious. To describe it any other way would be simply misleading. In the past sixty years, however, the mysteries have had time to become old friends of the professionals in the field. There are certainly enigmas, logical whirlpools into which you can fall and never get out, but at least the locations of those trouble spots are known. Writing about any well-established subject such as quantum theory is therefore in some sense easy.

In the case of chaos theory, by contrast, everything is new and fragmented; we face the other extreme. We are adrift on an ocean of uncertainties, guided by partial and inadequate maps, and it is too soon to know where the central mysteries of the subject reside.

Or, worse yet, to know if those mysteries are worth taking the time to explore. Is chaos a real “theory,” something which will change the scientific world in a basic way, as that world was changed by Newtonian mechanics, quantum theory, and relativity? Or is it something essentially trivial, a subject which at the moment is benefiting from a catchy name and so enjoying a certain glamor, as in the past there have been fads for orgone theory, mesmerism, dianetics, and pyramidology?

We will defer consideration of that question until we have had a look at the bases of chaos theory, where it came from, and where it seems to lead us.

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