Chaos theory is one of the most important scientific knowledge of this era, which has created a new natural science and set off a new wave of human thought.
Since Lorenz's discovery of the butterfly effect, chaos theory has explained the rhythm of life, the evolution of society, the shape of nature and the constants of the universe, and those seemingly irrelevant irregular phenomena have been given new meanings, and the perspective of human beings on themselves and all things has been completely broadened. With his high scientific literacy, the well-known popular science writer Greck explained the mysteries of chaos theory in simple terms.
The extraordinary sensitivity, perseverance and creativity of scientists, as well as the frustration and joy of their search for truth, are presented through the author's vivid writing. The book "Chaos: Pioneering a New Science" is Gleick's famous work, and it is also a popular science work in the field of chaos theory, which has been translated into 25 languages so far.
Source | Chaos: Pioneering a New Science
Author | James Greck
Translator | Lou Wai Shan
At one point in 1974, police officers in Los Alamos, a small town in New Mexico, United States, were worried about a man who was seen wandering in the dark night after night, wandering the alleys with a cigarette in his mouth. By the bright light of the stars shining through the thin air of the plateau, he would walk aimlessly for hours.
It's not just the police who are wondering, some physicists at the US National Laboratory have learned that their new colleague is experimenting with living a 26-hour day, which means that his routine will be slowly staggered from everyone's schedule. It's almost weird, even for the Theory Department.
In the three decades since J. Robert Oppenheimer chose this out-of-the-world New Mexico site to develop and build the atomic bomb, Los Alamos National Laboratory has sprawled the wilderness, home to particle accelerators, gas lasers, and chemical plants, as well as thousands of scientists, managers, and technicians, making it one of the world's most computer-dense locations.
Some of the older generation of scientists remember the hastily erected wooden buildings on this flat-topped hill in the '40s, but for most of the Los Alamos workers — young men and women in varsy corduroy and work shirts, the first atomic bombmakers were merely ghosts of the past.
The core of the lab's purely theoretical research is the Theory Department, also known as the T Department, just as the Computing Department is the C Department and the Weapons Department is the X Department. There are more than 100 physicists and mathematicians working in the T Department, well paid and without the pressure of teaching and dissertation. These scientists are no strangers to intelligence and strange behavior. They are not easily surprised.
But Mitchell Feigenbaum is an unusual case. Previously, he had only published a signed paper, and what he is currently working on does not see any prospects. His hair was long and messy, tucked back to reveal a broad forehead, in the style of those busts of German composers. His eyes were eager and passionate. When he spoke, he was always very fast, often omitting articles and pronouns, a bit like the Central Europeans, even though he was actually a native of Brooklyn, New York.
When he works, he puts his heart and soul into it. When he couldn't work, he used to think while walking, day or night, and night was best for him. Twenty-four hours a day may seem too restrictive. However, his personal quasi-cyclical experiments eventually came to an end when he decided he could no longer bear to wake up at sunset, which was bound to happen every few days.
At the age of twenty-nine, he has become an expert among experts, a temporary consultant; Other scientists would ask him questions that were particularly difficult to solve—when they were able to find him.
One evening, he came to work just as the lab director, Harold Agnew, was about to leave work. As one of Oppenheimer's first disciples, Agnew enjoyed great prestige. When the Enola Guy dropped its first product in the laboratory in Hiroshima, Japan, he filmed the whole process from an observation plane next to him.
"I know you're very smart," Agnew said to Fegenbaum, "and if you're that smart, why don't you solve the problem of laser fusion?" ”
Even Feigenbaum's friends wondered if he would finally be able to make something of his own. Although Feigenbaum was happy to improvise magic on their problems, he didn't seem interested in turning his research to anything that might be rewarding.
He thinks about turbulence in liquids and gases. He thinks about time—is it flowing smoothly, or is it beating discretely, like an endless sequence of cosmic cinematic images? He pondered how the eye could see stable colors and shapes, especially since physicists already knew that our universe was an ever-changing quantum kaleidoscope. He thinks about clouds and often observes them through airplane portholes (until 1975, when his scientific travel privileges were officially suspended on the grounds of overuse), or from hiking trails away from his lab.
In the mountain towns of the western United States, the clouds do not resemble the gray haze that pervades the eastern air. At Los Alamos (which is on the leeward side of a huge volcanic crater), clouds fill the sky, arranged randomly, but sometimes not randomly—forming uniform nails or regular ridges, like sulci.
On an afternoon of thunderstorms, the sky was covered with dark clouds, lightning and thunder, and severe convective weather was visible forty or fifty kilometers away, while the whole sky seemed to be playing a big show, faintly mocking the physicists. Clouds represent an aspect of nature that has long been overlooked by the mainstream of physics, an aspect that is both vague and detailed, structured and unpredictable. Feigenbaum thought about these things, silently, in vain.
In the eyes of physicists, the realization of laser nuclear fusion is a serious problem, the cracking of the spin, color and taste of tiny particles is a serious problem, and the determination of the age of the universe is a serious problem. Understanding clouds is a question that may be left to meteorologists. Like other physicists, Feigenbaum described such problems in words that understated his fearlessness. These problems, he might say, are obvious, that is, any qualified physicist would be able to solve them after proper thought and calculation.
And for the most difficult problems, those that cannot be solved without a deep insight into the nature of the universe, physicists use words like "profound" to describe them. In 1974, Feigenbaum, though little known to his colleagues, was working on a profound problem: chaos.
Where chaos begins
This is where classical science stops
Ever since physicists began to explore the laws of nature, they have struggled to understand disorder in the atmosphere, turbulence in the oceans, fluctuations in wildlife populations, and oscillations in the heart and brain. These irregular aspects of nature, these discontinuous, unpredictable aspects, have always been a mystery in science, or worse, its ugly embarrassment.
But in the 70s of the 20th century, some scientists in the United States and Europe began to look for a way through disorder. This includes mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and chemists, all of whom are trying to find connections between different kinds of irregularities.
Physiologists have found an unexpected order in the disturbance of the human heart pulse, arrhythmia is the main cause of sudden death. Ecologists have explored the ups and downs of the dance moth population. Economists, on the other hand, turned up past stock price data and tried to use a new method of analysis. The insights gained are then directly applied to the natural world – whether it's the shape of clouds or the path of lightning; Whether it is the tree-like interweaving of microscopic blood vessels or the aggregation of macroscopic stars.
When Feigenbaum began to think about chaos at Los Alamos, he was one of the few scientists. These people are scattered and do not know each other for the most part. A mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, has assembled a small team to create a new science about "dynamical systems."
A population biologist at Princeton University is about to issue an ardent call for all scientists to focus on certain surprisingly complex behaviors hidden in simple models. A geometrician working at IBM was looking for a new term to describe a class of jagged, fragmented shapes that he saw as one of nature's organizing principles. A French mathematical physicist has just made the controversial claim that turbulence in fluids may be related to a strange, infinitely entangled abstraction that he calls a strange attractor.
More than a decade later, Chaos has become an acronym for a rapidly evolving movement that is constantly reshaping existing science. Chaos academic conferences and journals of chaos studies are emerging one after another.
Recommended Books for this issue
Chaos: Pioneering a New Science
Author: James Greck Translator: Lou Weishan