Chaos was once ignored by traditional science but is now both a pop sensation and a tremendously important field. But what is the science of chaos and why is it revolutionary and important?
The scientific revolution launched by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton left a great legacy: the idea of an orderly universe ruled by mathematical laws. But is there something disquieting in the idea of a vast, impersonal, clockwork universe of determinism with no room for chance?
By the late 19th century, three cracks appeared in determinism's foundations: relativity, quantum mechanics—and chaos. The "three-body problem" was considered the mathematical challenge of the era, and its solution, involving a still-unimagined chaos, eluded some of mathematics' greatest minds.
Henri Poincaré's groundbreaking work on the three-body problem implied that a system governed by deterministic laws could still be unpredictable; chaos had crept into the clockwork. Although Poincaré invented a new, visual way of thinking about the mathematics involved, his brilliant discovery was quickly forgotten.
For 70 years, chaos remained a scientific backwater. The calm ended with a thunderclap from a man fascinated by storms and weather. You see how Edward Lorenz discovered chaos in a model of weather patterns that allowed him to happen upon the "butterfly effect."
The butterfly effect—the extreme sensitivity of a chaotic system to tiny changes in its initial conditions—has become part of popular culture but is frequently misunderstood. You begin to understand not only its importance and power but also its limitations.
Your introduction to chaos has highlighted its unpredictable, random side, as exemplified by the butterfly effect. But there is also an amazing order inherent in chaos, and you learn how this can be visualized through the infinitely complex image known as a "strange attractor."
If a strange attractor is analogous to an image created through time-lapse photography, Lorenz's "iterated map" might be the product of a series of strobe-light photographs. But despite its profound implications, Lorenz's discovery failed to attract the scientific community's notice.
By the 1970s, there was an unprecedented convergence of disciplines. Researchers in mathematics, ecology, and fluid mechanics found themselves asking the same question: How does an orderly system suddenly turn chaotic? You see how a famous iterated map known as the logistic map reveals the most basic route.
You deepen your understanding of the logistic map with the icon of chaos known as the orbit diagram. Its breathtaking imagery amounts to a Rosetta Stone for making sense of certain forms of chaos in the natural world.
In 1978, physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum made a stunning breakthrough, showing that the logistic map displayed universal features so generic that they must also occur in nature, even though no laws of nature are built into it. You begin to understand how such universality arises.
In the early 1980s, painstaking experiments on such disparate systems as swirling fluids, electronic circuits, and oscillating chemical reactions confirmed the predictions of chaos theory. Overreaching by some advocates, however, has provoked a backlash of skepticism to this day.
The pioneers of chaos were bewildered by the fantastic shapes they encountered while trying to visualize chaos. In the first of several lectures devoted to these intricate shapes—now called fractals—you learn why they are so inextricably connected to chaos.
You are introduced to the two most distinctive properties of fractals—inexhaustible structural richness and "self-similarity," or the resemblance of the parts to the whole—before learning how the science of fractals came into being and its situation in the broader scientific landscape.
Using some idealized geometric examples, you learn how to define the dimension of a fractal—discovering that the usual categories of one-, two-, or three-dimensional usually do not apply, and that fractals are so convoluted they fall somewhere in between, such as 1.26-dimensional!
Fractals are not merely static geometric shapes but also can represent erratic processes in time, such as fluctuating stock prices, Internet data bursts, or earthquakes. You learn that their gyrations are wilder and more frequent than conventional statistical methods would predict and make their management more complex.
From lungs to nervous systems to the nutrient supply systems of plants, all living things are built from fractal networks. You examine this geometry of life, including a recent theory that invokes fractal architecture to explain one of the most comprehensive laws in biological science.
This lecture shows you some of the manifestations of fractals in art, including the controversial drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. Some have suggested that they contain fractal characteristics that changed over the course of his career in a very systematic way.
Does chaos have practical applications? Because tiny nudges to a chaotic system can have potent effects, these systems are exceptionally responsive. You see the advantages of harnessing chaos in the dramatic story of how a NASA mathematician "surfed" the gravitational field to salvage a Japanese lunar mission gone wrong.
Although the feasibility of encrypting electronic messages by cloaking them in chaotic "noise" has been verified in real-world tests, questions remain. Could an eavesdropper crack the chaos? This lecture shows you what such an application could mean in a world of growing concerns about cyberterrorism, national security, and cell phone and Internet privacy.
Building on decades of biological research, chaos theorists have been asking questions about the dynamics of bodily rhythms. Can the mathematics of chaos help predict an epileptic seizure? Quell or prevent cardiac arrhythmias? Perhaps most controversially, can chaos in the body ever be a sign of health rather than of sickness?
Can chaos theory coexist with quantum theory? Can it survive the descent to the strange world of the atom, where Newtonian trajectories dissolve into a haze of quantum probability waves? You see how scientists reconcile two radically different views of reality.
Large, complex systems having many interacting parts often display a remarkable capacity for organizing themselves, with their individual parts becoming synchronized. This lecture shows you systems as diverse as pendulum clocks, fireflies, heart cells, and menstrual cycles and takes you inside the opening-day swaying of London's Millennium Bridge.
You review what you've learned and examine the future role of chaos theory. In a world where most of the major unsolved issues facing science—including cancer, consciousness, the origin of life, and AIDS—involve fundamentally nonlinear systems, chaos theory can be a crucial first step toward their solution