Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

Author:James Gleick [Gleick, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Science, Chaotic Behavior in Systems
ISBN: 9781453210475
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2008-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

THE EXPERIMENTER

It’s an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that’s happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. It’s startling every time it occurs. One is surprised that a construct of one’s own mind can actually be realized in the honest-to–goodness world out there. A great shock, and a great, great joy.

—LEO KADANOFF

“ALBERT IS GETTING MATURE.” So they said at École Normale Supérieure, the academy which, with École Polytechnique, sits atop the French educational hierarchy. They wondered whether age was taking its toll on Albert Libchaber, who had made a distinguished name for himself as a low-temperature physicist, studying the quantum behavior of superfluid helium at temperatures a breath away from absolute zero. He had prestige and a secure place on the faculty. And now in 1977 he was wasting his time and the university’s resources on an experiment that seemed trivial. Libchaber himself worried that he would be jeopardizing the career of any graduate student he employed on such a project, so he got the assistance of a professional engineer instead.

Five years before the Germans invaded Paris, Libchaber was born there, the son of Polish Jews, the grandson of a rabbi. He survived the war the same way Benoit Mandelbrot did, by hiding in the countryside, separated from his parents because their accents were too dangerous. His parents managed to survive; the rest of the family was lost to the Nazis. In a quirk of political fate, Libchaber’s own life was saved by the protection of a local chief of the Pétain secret police, a man whose fervent right-wing beliefs were matched only by his fervent antiracism. After the war, the ten-year–old boy returned the favor. He testified, only half-comprehending, before a war crimes commission, and his testimony saved the man.

Moving through the world of French academic science, Libchaber rose in his profession, his brilliance never questioned. His colleagues did sometimes think he was a little crazy—a Jewish mystic amid the rationalists, a Gaullist where most scientists were Communists. They joked about his Great Man theory of history, his fixation on Goethe, his obsession with old books. He had hundreds of original editions of works by scientists, some dating back to the 1600s. He read them not as historical curiosities but as a source of fresh ideas about the nature of reality, the same reality he was probing with his lasers and his high-technology refrigeration coils. In his engineer, Jean Maurer, he had found a compatible spirit, a Frenchman who worked only when he felt like it. Libchaber thought Maurer would find his new project amusing—his understated Gallic euphemism for intriguing or exciting or profound. The two set out in 1977 to build an experiment that would reveal the onset of turbulence.

As an experimenter, Libchaber was known for a nineteenth-century style: clever mind, nimble hands, always preferring ingenuity to brute force. He disliked giant technology and heavy computation. His idea of a good experiment was like a mathematician’s idea of a good proof.

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