Chaos Theory -- Part 3 -- Chaos and Beyond

Chaos was the set of ideas persuading all those scientists that they were members of a shard enterprise. Physicist or biologist or mathematician, they believed that simple, deterministic systems could breed complexity; that systems too complex for traditional mathematics could yet obey simple laws; and that, whatever their particular field, their task was to understand complexity itself.

"God plays dice with the universe," is Joseph Ford's answer to Einstein's famous question. "But they're loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends."

Goethe wrote: "We have a right to expect from one who proposes to give us the history of any science, that he inform us of how the phenomena of which it treats were gradually known, and what was imagined, conjectured, assumed, or thought respecting them." This is a "hazardous affair," he continued, "for in such an undertaking, a writer tacitly announces at the outset that he means to place some things in light, others in shade. The author has, nevertheless, long derived pleasure from the prosecution of his task...."