Table of Contents
Prologue 1
The Butterfly Effect 9
Edward Lorenz and his toy weather
The computer misbehaves
Long-range forecasting is doomed
Order masquerading as randomness
A world of nonlinearity
"We completely missed the point"
Revolution 33
A revolution in seeing
Pendulum clocks, space balls, and playground swings
The invention of the horseshoe
A mystery solved: Jupiter's Great Red Spot
Life's Ups and Downs 57
Modeling wildlife populations
Nonlinear science, "the study of non-elephant animals"
Pitchfork bifurcations and a ride on the Spree
A movie of chaos and a messianic appeal
A Geometry of Nature 81
A discovery about cotton prices
A refugee from Bourbaki
Transmission errors and jagged shores
New dimensions
The monsters of fractal geometry
Quakes in the schizosphere
From clouds to blood vessels
The trash cans of science
"To see the world in a grain of sand"
Strange Attractors 119
A problem for God
Transitions in the laboratory
Rotating cylinders and a turning point
David Ruelle's idea for turbulence
Loops in phase space
Mille-feuilles and sausage
An astronomer's mapping
"Fireworks or galaxies"
Universality 155
A new start at Los Alamos
The renormalization group
Decoding color
The rise of numerical experimentation
Mitchell Feigenbaum's break-through
A universal theory
The rejection letters
Meeting in Como
Clouds and paintings
The Experimenter 189
Helium in a Small Box
"Insolid billowing of the solid"
Flow and form in nature
Albert Libchaber's delicate triumph
Experiment joins theory
From one dimension to many
Images of Chaos 213
The complex plane
Surprise in Newton's method
The Mandelbrot set: sprouts and tendrils
Art and commerce meet science
Fractal basin boundaries
The chaos game
The Dynamical Systems Collective 241
Santa Cruz and the sixties
The analog computer
Was this science?
"A long-range vision"
Measuring unpredictability
Information theory
From microscale to macroscale
The dripping faucet
Audiovisual aids
An era ends
Inner Rhythms 273
A misunderstanding about models
The complex body
The dynamical heart
Resetting the biological clock
Fatal arrhythmia
Chick embryos and abnormal beats
Chaos as health
Chaos and Beyond 301
New beliefs, new definitions
The Second Law, the snowflake puzzle, and loaded dice
Opportunity and necessity
Notes on Sources and Further Reading 318
Acknowledgments 341
Index 343