Chaos Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Chaos

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Zusammenfassung von Chaos

Name: Chaos
Rating: 4.6 (260 reviews)
Author: James Gleick

James Gleick

Making a New Science

4.6 (260 Bewertungen)

22 Min.

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Mathematik Naturwissenschaft Physik

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Chaos
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What’s in it for me? Discover the order hiding beneath the chaos of life.

If it were up to physicists, the world would run like clockwork: regularly and predictably, according to a few simple rules. And for a long time, they studied the world as if it did. Any signs of randomness and disorder in their data were dismissed as flukes.

But in the 1970s, a handful of scientists decided to take these flukes seriously. Employing new computer technology, they found chaotic behavior everywhere: in weather patterns, the irregular drip of a faucet, in the rhythm of our hearts. Then, they realized something exciting: there was a strange order hiding behind the chaos.

These blinks tell the story of how the new field of chaos theory revolutionized science – and explain why chaos might be the ordering principle of life.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why we may blame a butterfly in Peking for a storm in New York;
why the coast of Britain is infinitely long; and
how to give a mosquito jet lag.

Meteorologist Edward Lorenz became the intellectual father of chaos theory after discovering the unpredictability of weather.

How much do you trust the weather forecast?

In the 1950s, scientists were highly optimistic about the possibilities of predicting – even manipulating – the weather. This hope lay in new computer technology.

Of course, they knew that it was hard to get perfect measurements on something as complicated as the weather. But they thought that with good enough data and a lot of computer power, it would be possible to calculate the weather for months ahead – at least roughly.

They’d no idea how fragile, unstable, and chaotic physical systems like the Earth’s weather really are. It took a mathematically-minded meteorologist to demonstrate this.

Here’s the key message: Meteorologist Edward Lorenz became the intellectual father of chaos theory after discovering the unpredictability of weather.

In 1960, Edward Lorenz began running a weather simulation on his brand new computer. He wanted to study how weather patterns change over time. And he stumbled on something deeply unsettling.

Lorenz’s weather simulation was pretty simple – it didn’t even have clouds. Conditions like temperature and airstream were represented by numbers. To study how they behaved over time, Lorenz would pick one of those variables and print out a graph that plotted its fluctuations.

One day in 1961, he wanted to rerun a simulation from the day before. But he decided to start in the middle of the simulation, typing in the numbers from the previous printout by hand.

At the beginning, the second simulation behaved just like the first. But then, the variables’ behavior started deviating. As simulated time went on, they got more and more out of sync. Finally, the motion of the second graph looked totally different from the first.

What caused this massive incongruity? Lorenz had typed in the numbers from the previous simulation only up to the third decimal point. For airstream, for instance, he’d typed in .506. But the computer’s calculations actually ran up to the sixth decimal point: .506127. Somehow, this tiny difference was enough to throw the weather prediction completely off the previous track.

Lorenz was shocked. Like other scientists at the time, he believed that small fluctuations didn’t have big effects on large-scale systems like the weather. Instead, his mistake revealed how unstable, unpredictable, and chaotic these systems really could be.

Lorenz dubbed it the butterfly effect. This means systems like our weather are so sensitive to small disturbances that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing today could be responsible for a raging storm next month in New York. In science-speak, this is also known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” – and it became the cornerstone of the new field of chaos theory.

Simple nonlinear systems can produce incredibly complex behavior.

Sensitive dependence on initial conditions is everywhere. If you’ve ever missed a bus, which made you miss a flight, which ruined an entire business trip, then you know: tiny errors can snowball into complete chaos.

The butterfly effect is one reason why Lorenz was fascinated by the weather. It means that even if we covered the earth in weather sensors a foot apart, we still couldn’t calculate the weather for a few weeks ahead. A second fascinating feature of the weather is that it’s aperiodic – it’s almost cyclical, but it never quite repeats itself.

In the 1970s, physicists and mathematicians began studying nonlinear systems in earnest.

Scientists like to have their expectations thwarted about as much as the rest of us. And they certainly weren’t expecting that some of the most fundamental physical systems in our world behave in completely chaotic, unpredictable ways. So naturally, most of them weren’t too thrilled about this new chaos theory embraced by younger, freethinking scientists from the 1970s onwards.

It sounded unscientific, unconventional, and most importantly, it seemed to complicate – even contradict – what they thought they knew about the universe. Up until Lorenz, most scientists had stuck to describing the world in linear ways.

Animal populations behave like nonlinear dynamical systems.

Nonlinear dynamical systems aren’t just a pet project of mathematicians and physicists. As Lorenz showed when he studied the weather, nonlinear systems are fundamental to nature.

Animal populations, for example, change in a nonlinear, dynamical way. The subfield of biology that studies how they behave over time is called ecology – and it was one of the first fields to connect its findings to chaos theory.

Mandelbrot's fractal geometry revealed the infinitely intricate patterns of complex dynamical systems

Throughout his life, the mathematician and polymath Benoit Mandelbrot ended up in places where he wasn’t welcome. First, as a child, he fled with his family from Poland to France in the 1930s. After the war, he felt stifled by the intellectual climate at the École Polytechnique, where he studied mathematics. At the time, pure math was all the rage, and his colleagues didn’t appreciate his visual approach to mathematical problems. So Mandelbrot escaped to the US, where he found work at the IBM research center in New York.

In his research, too, Mandelbrot often chose unfriendly territory. One of his first interests at IBM was studying economic patterns, like income distribution and price changes. When he studied fluctuations in cotton prices in the nineteenth century, he got a first glimpse of the discovery that would make him famous: the intricately nested nature of our universe.

Strange attractors helped physicists understand the complicated motions of turbulence.

On his deathbed, quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg swore to ask God two questions about physics: Why relativity? And, why turbulence? “I really think He may have an answer to the first question,” Heisenberg joked.

Of all the longstanding problems in physics, turbulence is among the thorniest. It arises when a smooth flow of a gas or liquid suddenly turns messy, breaking up into whorls and eddies. Turbulence is everywhere, and poses a big problem for engineers. When the smoke ring of a cigarette rises steadily before breaking up into little curls, we might watch in fascination. But when the same thing happens beneath the wings of an airplane we’re traveling in, we’re more likely to panic.

Discovering the universal principles of nonlinear systems, Mitchell Feigenbaum elevated chaos theory to new levels of credibility

At the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1974, staff and police were growing a bit concerned. A disheveled-looking man was walking around the campus at night, chain-smoking and pacing erratically.

The eccentric turned out to be Mitchell Feigenbaum, a young mathematical physicist on the verge of a mind-boggling discovery.

A group of young mathematicians at Santa Cruz used computer visuals and everyday phenomena to popularize chaos theory.

By 1977, most scientists had heard about a strange new field of physics called chaos theory. The first big chaos conference was held in Como, Italy, that same year. But if you were a young math or physics student interested in chaos, there were still no mentors – let alone professors – to guide you.

At the new Santa Cruz campus of the University of California, a group of young mathematicians took matters into their own hands. It started with a quiet young graduate student named Robert Stetson Shaw. He’d heard about the Lorenz attractor, and he started playing around by plotting its equations on the big, analog computer on campus. Shaw could adjust the variables of the equations by turning knobs on the computer, and it helped him visualize the sensitive dependence on the initial conditions Lorenz had discovered.

Nonlinear dynamical systems are everywhere in nature – and particularly important to our biology.

Once the idea of chaos had made its way into the scientific mainstream, researchers began discovering nonlinear dynamical systems everywhere around them.

French physician Albert Libchaber teamed up with an engineer for an experiment meant to prove Feigenbaum’s theory of turbulent fluid motion. Libchaber constructed a tiny box that held liquid helium between two metal plates, which he could heat separately. Creating a few millidegrees of difference in temperature between the plates led the helium to start moving. First, as the warm liquid rose and the cool liquid sunk, the helium fluid organized itself into two rolling cylinders. But as Libchaber turned up the temperature, he observed the familiar pattern of period-doubling bifurcations.

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Worum geht es in Chaos?

Chaos (1987) delves into the most recent theoretical revolution in physics: chaos theory. In the 1970s, scientists began discovering that the world doesn’t behave as neatly as classical physics suggests. From the weather to animal populations to our heartbeats – irregularities, disorder, and chaos pervade our universe. And yet, there seems to be a strange order to the chaos of life. Chaos explores the history of this new science, revealing its startling findings, and pondering its implications.

Wer Chaos lesen sollte

Curious minds interested in unraveling the mysteries of the universe
People interested in the history of modern science
Anyone looking to understand and appreciate the chaos of life

Über den Autor

James Gleick is a science historian, journalist, and author. He’s considered one of the best writers on physics and technology of the last decades and is said to have been the inspiration for the character of Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park. Gleick has written multiple international best sellers, including the acclaimed biography Genius – The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.

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