Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order (Penguin Press Science) by Strogatz Steven

Author:Strogatz, Steven [Strogatz, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-14-193318-4
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2004-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

The author, with his confident mix of scientific insight and contempt for received wisdom, signed his name:

Prof. Brian Josephson

Department of Physics

University of Cambridge

III

EXPLORING SYNC

• Seven •

SYNCHRONIZED CHAOS

H E DIDN’T GIVE THE IMPRESSION OF BEING a revolutionary. A small, modest man, seventyish, prone to speaking in a monotone, Ed Lorenz looked and acted more like a quiet country person, like a farmer you might see at a roadside stand in Maine. I’d often see him when I ate dinner at the MIT cafeteria in Walker Memorial. He’d hobble in with his wife, holding hands, holding canes with their free hands. Every time I taught my chaos course, we’d go through the same ritual each year, and I’d come to look forward to it. I’d call up Professor Lorenz and invite him to come give a guest lecture to the class. He’d say, with genuine puzzlement, as if it were an open question, “What should I talk about?” And I’d say, How about the Lorenz equations? “Oh, that little model?” And then, as predictable as the seasons, he’d show his face to my awestruck class, and tell us not about the Lorenz equations but about whatever he was working on then. It didn’t matter. We were all there to catch a glimpse of the man who’d started the modern field of chaos theory.

“That little model” had changed the direction of science forever. In 1963, while trying to understand the unpredictability of the weather, Lorenz wrote down a set of three differential equations, nonlinear ones, but not horrible-looking. In fact, to a mathematician or physicist, they looked deceptively simple, like the standard exercises found in textbooks. I could solve that, you’d think to yourself. But you couldn’t. No one could. The solutions to the Lorenz equations behaved like nothing mathematics had ever seen. His equations generated chaos: seemingly random, unpredictable behavior governed by nonrandom, deterministic laws.

At first, nobody noticed the new arrival. Lorenz’s paper “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” buried on pages 130 to 141 of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences , was cited only about once a year for the first decade of its existence. But once the chaos revolution was in full swing, in the 1970s and 1980s, the little model averaged a hundred citations a year.

The first wave hit when a few scientists in diverse fields began to realize that they were all seeing manifestations of the same mysterious phenomenon. Ecologists stumbled upon chaos in a simple model for the dynamics of a wildlife population. Instead of leveling off or repeating in cycles, the simulated population unexpectedly boomed and crashed erratically from one generation to the next, even though there was nothing random in the model itself. Astronomers were perplexed by their measurements of the rotational motion of Hyperion, a small, potato-shaped moon of Saturn; instead of spinning on one axis like most satellites, it tumbled haphazardly, as if doing drunken somersaults. Physicists took time off from pondering quarks and black holes and began to pay attention to more mundane phenomena

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