The Essence of Chaos by Edward N. Lorenz (review)

Book Reviews87 EDWARD N. LORENZ. The Essence of Chaos. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. 240 p. James Gleick's popular Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) gave us an interesting story of the emergence of chaos theory. His account, however, is yet another one that heroizes and masculinizes the history of science as the drama of man (not humankind) against the universe and its secrets. In 1990, N. Katherine Hayles re-told the story of chaos theory in her Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. There she argued convincingly that "different disciplines base the theories they construct on similar presuppositions because these are the assumptions that guide the constitution of knowledge in a given episteme" (xi). Holding degrees in chemistry (B.S., M.S.) and a doctorate in English, she attempted to redress some of the effects of Gleick's popularization of the "new science" and to initiate a deserved feminist critique of his narrative methodology. In 1992, M. Mitchell Waldrop brought us his engagingly readable Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge ofOrder and Chaos. Yet his chapter titles alone suggest how his work resonates with that of Gleick: "The Irish Idea of Hero," "The Revolt of the Old Turks," "Secrets of the Old One," "Tou Guys Really Believe That?' " and so on. With the arrival of Edward Lorenz's The Essence of Chaos, however, we have the voice of someone who wishes to tell us clearly and simply about chaos and not to perpetuate any myths about either science or its personalities . Throughout the book, he is genial and straightforward, speaking with the voice of a major participant in the development of chaos theory who wants to share with the reader its history and the names ofthe many others who contributed to the project. He speaks even-handedly about his predecessors , his postdocs, his colleagues, his competitors in the search for solutions , and the people who suggested he needed a computer (and then a larger one) for his work. The reader leaves the text as one would leave an absorbing visit with a magnanimous teacher. Although Lorenz wants to be clear and simple, one of the great virtues of his book is that he refuses to oversimplify or to blur distinctions; thus much of the beginning of the book tells us how the subject of chaos is large and complicated. "Glimpses of Chaos" is an admirably apt chapter title which signals the quiet wit and good humor that characterize the book. Consider, too, the subsections within the chapter: "It Only Looks Random," "Pinballs and Butterflies," "It Ain't Got Rhythm," and "Zeroing In on Chaos." Lorenz carefully prepares the reader with respect to what is chaos and what is limited chaos, to what is randomness and what is apparent randomness. "I shall use the term chaos to refer collectively to processes of this sort," Lorenz writes, "ones that appear to proceed according to chance even though their behavior is in fact determined by precise laws" (4). The problem of defining chaos is complicated, he tells us, "because several other terms, notably nonlinearity, complexity, and fractality, are often used more or less synonymously with chaos in one or several of its senses" (4). For example , a narrow definition of randomness: "a random sequence of events is 88Rocky Mountain Review one in which anything that can ever happen can happen next" (6). A somewhat broader definition, however, is "a random sequence is simply one in which any one of several things can happen next, even though not necessarily anything that can ever happen can happen next" (7). For Lorenz, sensitive dependence on initial conditions is central to an acceptable definition of chaos. He moves methodically, in this fashion, to describe a chaotic system "as one that is sensitively dependent on interior changes in initial conditions. Sensitivity to exterior changes will not by itself imply chaos. Concurrently, we may wish to modify our idea as to what constitutes a single dynamical system, and decide that, if we have altered the value of any virtual constant, we have replaced our system by another system. In that case chaos, as just redefined, will be equivalent to sensitive dependence on...